Speakers

Professor Caroline Homer AO is Deputy Director, Gender Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at the Burnet Institute in Melbourne and Emeritus Professor of Midwifery at the University of Technology Sydney. She holds an NHMRC Investigator Grant.

Caroline is a hospital-trained nurse and midwife who found herself at St George Hospital in Sydney as a research midwife in 1996. More through good luck rather than good planning, and by finding great people to work with at St George and at UTS, she went onto to complete two masters degrees and a PhD and became Clinical Midwifery Consultant at the hospital also working in the birth centre for many years. She was appointed Professor of Midwifery at UTS in 2005. In 2018, she moved to the Burnet Institute in Melbourne as the co-program director of Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health.

Caroline has led research and development in midwifery, maternal and newborn health including immunisation and health system strengthening for more than 25 years in Australia and across the Asia-Pacific region. She is the Chair of WHO’s Strategic Technical Advisory Committee for Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health and Nutrition (STAGE). Caroline has been part of WHO guideline panels for many years including the recent postnatal care guidelines.

Saraswathi Vedam is Lead Investigator of the Birth Place Lab and Professor of Midwifery, at University of British Columbia. She has been a clinician and a health professional educator for 35 years. Professor Vedam has successfully coordinated multi-stakeholder and community-led research projects in provincial, national, and international settings. In 2017, she was selected as one of the inaugural Michael Smith Health Research Institute Health Professional Investigators. She is convener and chair of the Global Perinatal Task Force on Quality and Rights in Perinatal Services.

Dr. Vedam has applied her expertise with instrument development and psychometric evaluation to the development of clinical screening tools, MAPi, the Movement and Pulse index to assess fetal well-being, and scales to measure provider attitudes to home birth (PAPHB, PAPHI-i), and autonomy (MADM), respect (MORi), and mistreatment (MIST) during pregnancy and childbirth. She led the multidisciplinary development of the MISS index, an evidence-based composite measure of the integration of midwives into health systems. She also led Delphi teams of multi-disciplinary experts to develop and validate the Birthplace ResQu Index, the first critical appraisal tool for research on safety of birth place; and the Undisturbed Labour and Birth Facility Index, a quality improvement tool to enhance access to physiologic birth and optimal use of Cesarean. 

Professor Vedam is currently PI of a CIHR-funded national research project to evaluate respectful maternity care, Research Examining the Stories of Pregnancy and Childbearing Today (RESPCCT). The RESPCCT study used a global Delphi process to develop the first international Registry of validated measures of respectful maternity care. Patient-responsive knowledge translation led to development of an interprofessional online course, Dialogue and Decisions, to teach health professional trainees the process of person-centred decision making, transdisciplinary collaboration, and conflict transformation.

Dr Heke is of Waikato Tainui descent and was raised in the mountain environments of New Zealand’s South Island. Over the past 40 years Dr Heke has been a guide in Milford Sound’s World Heritage Park, a mountain bike and ski guide in numerous alpine locations globally and more recently leading groups to experience traditional Māori environmental science.

Dr Heke has post graduate degrees in Environmental Management, educational psychology and a PhD in population health. Dr Heke’s current research focus has been using Systems Dynamics to help Māori and other indigenous groups abroad, build their own health and wellness activities through traditional environmental knowledge. In this capacity, Dr Heke was awarded a research grant by Johns Hopkins University combining Systems Science and Maori Environmental Connections.

Dr Heke also retains teaching positions with Case Western Reserve University and Montana State University. However, Dr Heke’s current role is with Google X’s (San Francisco) generative AI initiative. Dr Heke has also been developing VR180 Māori environmental experiences with a particular interest in high performance sport. More specifically his work has been looking at converting elite athletes into environmental champions by teaching them how to be environmentally centred rather than athlete centred in the ways that they train and evaluate elite performance.

Biography to be provided shortly