CREATE

The Community Racial Equity And Training Interventions and Evaluation of Current and Future Healthcare Clinicians (CREATE) Study is to partner with Black women and perinatal healthcare providers to develop a racial equity training that centers on and uplifts the experiences and demands of Black women and birthing people, while also being responsible to learning needs and healthcare regulations of perinatal care providers. 

We developed the Racial Equity Training for Perinatal Healthcare Providers curriculum to: 

1. Increase awareness of racism and discrimination.
2. Reduce implicit racist attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.
3. Increase confidence and use of individual-level tools and strategies to provide respectful and dignified care.
4. Provide tools and strategies to have discussions with peers and leadership about system-level tools to develop systems of accountability.

Even though prenatal care (PNC) helps prevent many of these complications, Black women often face unfair treatment and bias in medical settings. This creates real barriers to getting the care they need. California has taken some steps by requiring doctors to take training on implicit bias, but we still don’t have proven solutions that directly improve care for Black women during pregnancy. That’s where this project comes in.

Our long-term goal is to make pregnancy safer and healthier for Black women. Using a reproductive justice approach, we've developed a training program specifically for prenatal care providers. This program is being built with input from both doctors and Black women in San Francisco, and it will be delivered online in an interactive format.

The training includes five key areas:

1. Understanding the history and impact of racism in the U.S.

2. Learning from Black women’s real-life experiences in healthcare

3. Addressing how racism shows up in medical settings

4. Hearing from clinicians and learning how they can improve

5. Creating personal and team-based action plans for change

We’re working closely with a team of Black women and prenatal care providers to make sure the training is relevant, respectful, and effective.

Our goal is to help providers:

• Better understand racial disparities in healthcare.

• Recognize and reduce their own biases.

• Deliver more respectful and culturally aware care.

• Push for system-wide changes in how clinics support Black women.

This will be one of the first projects to fully develop and test a scalable training to improve prenatal care through racial equity—bringing us one step closer to fair, compassionate healthcare for all.

^{Pregnancy Photos from CREATE Participants}

Who We Are: We are a research-driven team committed to advancing reproductive justice by developing solutions that improve the quality of prenatal care for Black women.

Who We Serve: We serve Black women who face systemic barriers in maternal healthcare, as well as the clinicians who provide their prenatal care.

What We Do: We design and implement equity-focused training interventions that address racism in healthcare and empower prenatal care providers to deliver respectful, informed, and compassionate care.

Our Research in Action – Through partnerships with medical institutions and community stakeholders, we’re creating and testing an interactive, evidence-based racial equity training to improve maternal outcomes for Black women and birthing people.

^{CREATE team in working meeting}