Alex Saucedo: Bridging a Research Gap to Safeguard High-Risk Pregnancies »

I have a strong passion for caring for patients with high-risk pregnancies, surgical obstetrics and operative delivery, and academic mentoring of trainees. I strive to provide a full spectrum of equitable reproductive health care to all patient backgrounds, especially patients within underserved communities.

Having trained in multiple high-volume academic centers across Texas puts me in a unique position to understand the most common conditions affecting patients in major urban Texas cities and identify the barriers our patients most commonly face. I have used my experiences in these institutions to understand the breadth of labor and delivery practices across the state and how these practices translate into patient outcomes.

For example: professional societies like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine have published recommendations on common labor management strategies. However, these guidelines are vague and based on primarily low-risk, term, singleton pregnancies. Texas faces an increasing number of high-risk pregnancies complicated by increased medical morbidities such as obesity, cardiac disease, hypertensive disorders, diabetes and higher-order, or repeat, cesarean deliveries.

A large gap in literature exists within the labor management of high-risk pregnancies, and providers are left to extrapolate the recommended standard of care for high-risk pregnancies, which face much different challenges in their labor management. This is where my experience at UT has tremendously supported me into the investigation of these pregnancies and labor management strategies.