Carol Sakala(NPWF)
Carol Sakala, PhD, MSPH, served as a member of the Health Care Payment Learning & Action Network’s Clinical Episode Payment Work Group and as its liaison to the Leadership Committee of LAN’s Consumer and Patient Affinity Group. She is Director of Childbirth Connection Programs at the National Partnership for Women & Families. She joined the organization in January 2014 when Childbirth Connection joined forces with the National Partnership to integrate maternity care policy, quality, and consumer engagement into the National Partnership’s program portfolio. She is a long-time maternity care educator, researcher, author and advocate for improved policy and practice, with a continuous focus on meeting the needs and interests of childbearing women and their families. Sakala served for 14 years as Director of Programs at Childbirth Connection. Developed under her program leadership, Childbirth Connection’s portfolio includes multi-stakeholder consensus reports delineating a “2020 Vision” and a “Blueprint for Action” for a high-quality, high-value maternity care system; continuous commitments to fostering evidence-based maternity care and helping women navigate the maternity care system; and identification of the experiences and perspectives of childbearing women through a decade of national “Listening to Mothers” surveys and use of results for improvement. Sakala and Childbirth Connection Programs served as trusted and valued resources to health professionals, childbearing women, policymakers, the media, and a broad range of organizations and agencies, frequently as a convener or participant in multi-stakeholder deliberative bodies and through widely consulted reports and other resources. Sakala was a Pew Health Policy fellow at Boston University where she received a doctorate in health policy through the University Professors Program. She has master’s degrees from the University of Utah and the University of Chicago.