Placement: City University of New York
Mentor: Terry M. McGovern, JD, Senior Associate Dean for Academic and Student Affairs, Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, City University of New York
Project: Innovations and Harm-Reduction Strategies for Abortion Seekers Following the Overturning of Roe v Wade—Lessons in Care Access from the U.S. and Mexico
Sabrina Das, MB ChB, MRCOG, PGDip (BA), is a 2024–25 Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice. She maintains a clinical practice as a Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in London, specializing in high-risk pregnancy and complex intrapartum care. She also works for NHS England as a National Maternity Improvement Advisor in the Maternity Safety and Support Programme, the highest level of intervention for maternity units across England. She also works as an abortion surgeon for Marie Stopes International and has worked for Médecins Sans Frontières as a women’s health specialist in conflict zones.
Das is passionate about using quality improvement, coaching, and leadership skills in improving the lives of the largest global group of disenfranchised people (women and girls). Her life mission is to use her clinical and nonclinical expertise to narrow the gap in clinical outcomes and quality of life for women of color, women in poverty, and others who have suffered systemic and historical disadvantage. Das has led projects in Yemen utilizing quality improvement methods to reduce hemorrhage rates, in ethnically diverse West London to coproduce interventions to build trust between formal health care institutions and the local community, and in coastal communities of England to develop equitable pathways of care access. She has published and spoken extensively about quality improvement and how to take policy into practice.
In 2022, Das was listed as one of “50 Leading Lights” by the Kind Leadership Revolution’s Kindness in Leadership Campaign. That year she was also a finalist for the MAMA Academy Healthcare Professional of the Year Award, for providing personalized, culturally competent care to women with breech-presenting babies in pregnancy and labor. In 2021, she was a runner-up for the Health Services Journal Clinical Leader of the Year Award. In her spare time, Das volunteers for her local triathlon club and is an accredited British Triathlon Federation (BTF) Coach. She won the 2019 BTF Award for Children’s Coach of the Year.
Project overview: This study will search for a range of innovations and harm-reduction strategies that address abortion access following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which removed U.S. federal protection for abortion access in 2022. In addition to examining measures by formal health care institutions, the project will search for social, grassroots, and third-sector efforts, with an emphasis on those that particularly target care access for minoritized groups. By asking individuals and organizations that have direct experience with putting ideas into practice 1) what resources and conditions they needed to make the change and 2) how they knew their change worked, this research will seek reflections and lessons learned.