Carol Sakala, PhD, MSPH, is a nationally recognized thought leader in maternal health and maternity care, with expertise in maternity care system transformation and high-performing maternal care models. She is senior director for maternal health at the National Partnership for Women & Families and has led the organization’s maternal health portfolio for more than a decade.

Dr. Sakala is lead author of 2024 reports on Realizing the Potential of Maternity Care Payment Reform. She was a member of the Clinical Episode Payment Workgroup of the Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network (LAN), which developed guidance on maternity care episode payment, and of the strategy team that led the LAN’s Maternity Multistakeholder Action Collaborative. Her considerable involvement with maternity care performance measurement includes serving for many years as co-chair of the National Quality Forum’s Perinatal and Women’s Health Standing Committee and on numerous other measurement-related advisory bodies. Among many other advisory bodies, she was a member of the National Academies for Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Study Committee on Assessing Outcomes by Birth Setting. She is the lead author of recent major reports on several high-performing maternal care models—midwifery care, community birth settings, and doula support. She works to delineate health care’s role in meeting the social, mental health, and physical health needs of childbearing families and is the lead author of Raising the Bar for Maternal Health Equity and Excellence: Actionable Strategies for Healthcare Systems.

Dr. Sakala has been an investigator on all Listening to Mothers surveys, beginning in 2002. She currently serves as principal investigator of the Fourth National Listening to Mothers Survey, which will begin to report a rich array of data about views and experiences of childbearing women and people with 2023 births early in 2025.