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During this presentation Dr. Kavita Singh will discuss her work focused on evaluating quality improvement maternal and newborn child projects in Ghana and Ethiopia. These projects employed a quality improvement approach whereby health workers and staff at the local level formed quality improvement teams. Using quality improvement methods, these teams first identified barriers to providing high quality maternal and newborn care and then proposed simple, low-cost solutions to address these barriers. Dr. Singh’s external evaluation team employed a mixed methods approach to understand whether and how this intervention improved maternal and child health outcomes. The evaluation methods included quantitative impact analyses, team assessments, quality assessments and cost-effectiveness analyses.


BIO:
Kavita Singh (Ongechi), PhD, MPH, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Maternal and Child Health at UNC and also a Faculty Fellow at the Carolina Population Center. She served as the Senior Technical Advisor for Maternal and Child Health for the MEASURE Evaluation project, and now serves in that role for the Data for Impact Project (D4I). Dr. Singh has been the lead PI for the evaluation of several quality improvement projects focused on maternal and child health in Ghana and Ethiopia. She was also an evaluator for the Safe Motherhood Initiative in Malawi and has been researching the effect of postnatal care and essential newborn care on neonatal survival. Much of Dr. Singh’s current work is focused on methodologies to obtain data on hard to measure outcomes such as maternal mortality and techniques to improve the quality and use of health facility data. She used indirect estimation techniques to understand the effect of forced migration on refugee and host populations in Northern Uganda and South Sudan. She has also used venue-based methodologies to understand localities most in need of HIV prevention messages and services. Dr. Singh is keenly interested in translating pilot phase evaluation findings to inform the implementation of scale-up phases and adapting methodologies to get better data on maternal, child and newborn health outcomes.

Population Studies Center (PSC) Brown Bag seminars highlight recent research in population studies and serve as a focal point for building our research community.


NOTE: The last 15 minutes of this session are reserved for a professional development conversation between the presenter and PSC trainees.


Contact PSC Office for Zoom details.