I am writing to nominate our Health Equity Alliance 4 Life (HEAL) Committee for the DAISY Team Award. They are a passionate interprofessional OB team focused on promoting health equity, reducing health disparities, and building a culture of inclusion!

The HEAL committee was founded by its chair Tenesia Richards, RN. Tenesia first became aware of maternal health disparities after attending an Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric, and Neonatal Nurses (AWHONN) conference. Inspired to ensure health equity in her OB department, she partnered with Alexandra Cohen Hospital for Women and Newborns’ Dr. Corrina Oxford and Dr. Laura Riley to create the HEAL Committee.

The HEAL committee officially kicked off on February 1st, 2021, honoring Black History Month. They have the vision to become the national leader in reducing maternal health disparities by embedding a health equity lens throughout all their practices, policies, and patient interactions! Unique to this committee are the team meetings where uncomfortable, but necessary, conversations on structural racism, implicit biases, related patient experiences, and current events are discussed and digested. From there, the HEALers break out into several subcommittees to divide and conquer their many patient care improvements:

· Conducting patient experience surveys to identify disparities (they began a comprehensive learning collaboration with the NY State Dept of Health called the NYS Birth Equity Improvement Project, inviting NY birthing hospitals to also identify systemic racism impact on birth outcomes)

· Evaluating current policy & procedures for inequities. (i.e. drug screening practices)

· Initiating & sustaining health equity educational series (most recently holding a viewing party & post documentary discussion of the Hulu original documentary called Aftershock- When a black mother dies, there is a ripple effect).

· Implementing the Respectful Care at Birth initiative, to increase pt autonomy & shared-decision making by ensuring pt and nurse are part of the team and the decision-making

· Collaborating & aligning with external (community & state) organizations for data collection, education & resource data collection, staff education, patient experience, policy/ practice review, and case reviews.

· Creating an inclusive department culture that embraces change, transparency, accountability & growth

· Improving continuity of care through interdisciplinary and interdepartmental collaboration

With a membership list inclusive of clinical nurses, resident MDs, Attending OB & Pediatric Physicians, Physician assistants, Social Work, Patient Care Assistants, Unit clerks, Registrars, nurse educators, anesthesia providers, and hospital leadership, they embody the interprofessional commitment needed to accomplish health equity.

This team takes so many approaches to improve the patient experience and perinatal outcomes for Black birthing mothers in the community and is deserving of the DAISY Team Award.