Health Equity Activities

Vision: In collaboration with families, front-line health care providers, government, academic, and community partners, the CCPE's vision is working toward equitable maternal, newborn health outcomes for every family in Georgia and in global partner communities through collaboration, advocacy, bidirectional research, and education.

Mission: Collaborating to equip caregivers, medical providers, government, academic, and community partners with resources to address inequities in maternal and newborn health in Georgia and in global partner communities.

• Collaboration: The Center will be a maternal-newborn equity research and advocacy hub for Emory, Emory affiliated Global Health programs, the wider Atlanta community, and the state of Georgia. Bringing together researchers, health care practitioners, students from across schools and backgrounds participating in maternal-newborn equity research or advocacy to facilitate collaboration, share resources, reduce duplication and to provide better education and mentorship for students and junior faculty. Initially, the team hopes to do a survey across the wider university to identify maternal newborn researchers and on-going activities across schools and assess needs and resources.
• Advocacy: The Center will continue its strong research and implementation science work with the Georgia Department of Public Health and the Center for Disease Control to promote local capacity to employ data systems and continuous quality improvement to monitor both maternal and infant health disparities and the impacts of interventions deployed to address them. The global work of the center will focus on Emory priority sites especially Ethiopia and Tanzania, which both have active maternal and newborn health research work. The center hopes to provide consultation, collaboration with these existing partnerships when partners identify gaps in maternal and newborn care.
• Research: The Center will continue to facilitate and mentor high quality bidirectional research in Georgia and with global partners. The center also hopes to provide research training to community partners, families in Georgia and with global sites to increase research capacity for community participatory research and co-production.
• Education: Providing mentorship and capacity building in perinatal equity research and advocacy across the university, in Georgia and at global partner sites. Subsequent steps may include a database of ongoing projects and scholars, research working groups or cross talks, journal club and maternal-newborn equity research conferences or workshops.

Anne Dunlop-Lang MD
Co-Director
Professor of Obstetrics
Dept of OB/GYN
 
Amy RL Rule MD, MPH
Co-Director
Assistant Professor of Pediatrics
Divisions of Neonatology and Hospital Medicine
Department of Pediatrics

The Global Collaborating Center in Reproductive Health (GCC/RH) at the Woodruff Health Sciences Center of Emory University was created in 1981 to explore causes of, and develop solutions to, the high rates of fetal- infant mortality in the state of Georgia. GCC/RH is a working partnership of three Atlanta institutions: the Woodruff Health Sciences Center, the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Georgia Department of Public Health.

In 2022, Dr. Brann retired and Dr. Anne Dunlop (Professor of Obstetrics) and Dr. Amy Rule (Assistant Professor of Pediatrics) were named as Co-Directors of the GCCRH. Dr. Dunlop has been a partner and researcher with the GCCRH throughout her career at Emory. Dr. Amy Rule newly joined Emory in 2022 and brings years of experience in neonatal health equity and implementation science from her prior position. The GCCRH was a pioneer in what is more recently referred to as health equity research and policy. As we look toward the future, it is important to brand the center with a name that readily conveys what we do and what we are about: Perinatal equity. The centered was renamed in 2022: The Global Collaborating Center for Perinatal Equity.