Rebecca Clark, an assistant professor in Penn’s School of Nursing and senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, has been selected for a Betty Irene Moore Fellowship for Nurse Leaders and Innovators that provides $500,000 for a three-year research project focused on improving communications within maternity medicine teams.
“It was such a great and amazing surprise,” says Clark. “I knew faculty members from the Nursing School and Penn Medicine had nominated me for this, but I thought it was a real long shot.” Clark is a nurse, midwife, health services researcher, and Core Faculty member at Penn Nursing’s Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research (CHOPR).
Since earning her master’s in nursing from Penn in 2010 and her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2018, Clark’s research has been focused on identifying system-level changes crucial to improving birth equity and outcomes. Earlier in her career, as a midwife in West Virginia, she worked with opioid-dependent mothers and continues to focus on the inpatient maternity care challenges faced by patients from marginalized communities.
Her three-year Moore Fellowship research will explore how video feedback can be used to improve communication in in-patient maternity settings between the health care team and patients.
“Communication is a leading root cause of preventable maternal mortality in this country and Black women bear the brunt of that,” said Clark. “Throughout the qualitative research literature as well as in social media, Black maternity patients repeatedly say, ‘No one listened.’ Think about Serena Williams to understand that better. She knew she was having a pulmonary embolism, but she was told ‘No, you’re fine. Go back to your room.'”
This story is by Hoag Levins. Read more at Penn LDI.
