Dr. Karen Scott

Dr. Karen A. Scott, MD, MPH, FACOG (she/her), is the Chief Black Feminist Physician Scientist, Founding CEO, and Owner of Birthing Cultural Rigor, LLC, with more than 25 years of advocating for the dignity and sanctity of Black women and girls. She is an improvement and implementation scientist, activist, teacher, and mentor grounded in a Black feminist-reproductive justice praxis with formal training and experience as a community-based OBGYN physician and applied epidemiologist. Dr. Scott’s ethical, theoretical, and methodological approaches interrogate health services design, provision, evaluation, and training in antepartum, intrapartum, and postpartum units as sites through which obstetric racism is enacted against the humanity, bodies, and lives of Black women, girls, and gender expansive people, in the afterlife of slavery and passage of the Congressional Act of 1807 (which took effect in 1808, prohibiting further participation of the United States in the slave trade.).

During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Dr. Scott launched a national study called SACRED Birth to validate a novel survey instrument designed by Dr. Scott that examines Safety, Autonomy, Communication, Racism, Empathy, and Dignity during childbirth hospitalization. SACRED Birth affirmed and amplified the voices and lived experiences of more than 1100 Black women and people across 348 hospitals and 34 states, including D.C., as patient, community, and content experts. To date, the Patient Reported Experience Measure of OBstetric racism©, also known as the PREM-OB Scale™ suite, remains one of the most culturally and scientifically rigorous and relevant perinatal PREMs that operationalizes reproductive justice, research justice, and Black feminism in hospital-based quality improvement and implementation initiatives.

At the end of 2021, Dr. Scott relocated to her birthplace in Nashville, TN to be closer to her chosen and given family residing throughout the South and Midwest. Currently, she serves on the TN Maternal Mortality Review Committee and the External Advisory Board for the NIH Network of the National Library of Medicine National Center for Data Services.