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BY ELIZABETH BASSETT
April 28, 2008
For millennia, midwives were the only health care available to many women giving birth.
While the profession has roots in serving women who didn’t have access to physicians, modern midwives are practicing in homes, birthing centers and hospitals nationwide.
Today, nurse-midwives, who have nursing degrees as well as advanced education in midwifery, work alongside the physicians who once were not available. The goal of the collaboration is to provide the best health care to women and their infants, and midwives today offer more choices to women, according to professionals in the field.
There are an estimated 350 nurse-midwives in Texas, according to the American College of Nurse-Midwives. In 2005, there were 306,377 births in the United States that were attended by a nurse-midwife, and from 1990 through 2004 Texas had the second-largest increase in certified nurse-midwife-attended births.
While nurse-midwives still represent a small percentage of nurses and a modest number of attended births in the United States, those in the industry provide care to women throughout their reproductive life and are dedicated to providing more health care options for women, some say.
Kathleen Donaldson, the head of certified nurse-midwifery at Harris Methodist Fort Worth Hospital, worked for 13 years as a nurse practitioner before returning to school to become a nurse-midwife. Despite a thorough educational background, she said taking the national exam required for all nurse-midwives was one of the hardest things she’s ever done.
“We look at women as a whole,” she said.
Donaldson now works providing family planning and gynecological services to women throughout their lives as well as health care to women from conception through postpartum care. She is one of five nurse-midwives on staff at Harris, and most of them went through the educational program that was at UT Southwestern Medical Center.
Currently, there is only one program in Texas for people to learn to become nurse-midwives, and that program is still unofficial. The program, which was at UT Southwestern, is now affiliated with Baylor University, and is awaiting authorization from the Board of Regents in May to become a recognized program.
The program has already been pre-accredited by the American College of Nurse-Midwives, said Mary Ann Faucher, as associate professor at the Louise Herrington School of Nursing at Baylor University. It’s also already generated a great deal of interest from prospective students, she said.
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