BABY BOON From New York City to the Navajo Nation, Columbia Midwives Care
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t Tséhootsooí Medical Center in Fort Defiance, Arizona, Rebecca Willis ’09 ’13, MS, MPH, serves as a nurse-midwife on the Navajo Nation. In Albany, Georgia, a small city 180 miles south of Atlanta, Lodz Joseph ’16 ’17, MS, works as a nurse-midwife among vulnerable populations. And in rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Sheilagh Cullen ’00 ’01, MS, provides care to Old Order Amish women who give birth at home. While these graduates of Columbia Nursing’s nurse-midwifery program specialize in providing maternal health services and newborn care, they do more: they also provide family planning and gynecological care, collaborate with MDs to screen for and treat pregnancy-related high blood pressure and diabetes, counsel the people under their care about obesity and other health risks, and educate and advise patients on wellness and self-care. Working in communities all over the United States, Columbia-educated nurse-midwives embody the success of the school’s nurse-midwifery program, which prepares graduates for independent clinical careers in evidence-based women’s healthcare.
Columbia Nursing created the nation’s first graduate program in nurse-midwifery in 1955, through a partnership with the Maternity Center Association of New York. And in 1956, Columbia Nursing awarded the nation’s first master’s degree in clinical nurse-midwifery. Today, the program’s rigorous curriculum — accredited by the Accreditation Commission for Midwifery Education (ACME) — combines health sciences fundamentals with training in clinical skills, professional practices, and the impact of policy on clinical practice. Upon completion of the program, graduates take the national certifying examination administered by the American Midwifery Certification Board to become a certified nurse-midwife. In addition, the program cultivates critical thinking and cultural sensitivity, laying a firm foundation for careers in healthcare delivery, policy, and education. Given the inequities in access to care and outcomes that affect pregnancy and childbirth in the U.S., Program Director Laura Zeidenstein ’05, DNP, urges all graduates to pursue careers that balance clinical practice and advocacy. “To become a midwife in our program means developing a deep awareness about disparities,” she says, “and the ways in which midwives can address the effects of racism and poverty, which too often result in high maternal mortality and morbidity rates.” For Willis, this means honoring the longstanding cultural practices of the women who seek care at Tséhootsooí Medical Center, which in 2010 became the fourth self-determined, tribally administered hospital on the Navajo Nation — a 27,000-square-mile reservation. “We try to incorporate traditional practices,” she says of the 300 to 400 births at the hospital each year, 90 percent of which the hospital’s eight midwives attend. By conventional metrics, the center’s maternal outcomes are more than solid — a cesarean-section rate of just 10 to 12 percent (nationwide, the rate hovers at close to 30 percent) and a similarly low epidural rate that, in part, reflects local values.
Illustrations by Alyssa Carvara
