Certified Nurse Midwives Certified nurse midwives (CNM’s) are advanced practice nurses and primary care providers for women in the United States. CNM’s work in a variety of settings including doctor’s offices, clinics, hospitals, freestanding birth centers, and homes. Nurse midwives receive a thorough education prior to sitting for certification and becoming qualified to be independent providers with prescriptive authority in all 50 states. The field of nurse midwifery offers a wide variety of avenues to pursue along with being one of the most financially lucrative of all nursing specialties. Nurse midwives provide care to women that differs from physicians in that it recognizes the individual woman and helps to support her wishes and desires during pregnancy and birth. Most importantly, the care given by CNM’s has been proven to increase good maternal and fetal outcomes.
Midwives in the United States
…show more content…
Traditional Midwives and “Granny” midwives were scantly represented mostly in rural areas but they were gradually no longer allowed to work unless they grandfathered in. In the 1970’s Traditional or “lay” (self-taught) midwives cropped up and continue to be minimally represented in the US providing care for homebirths. From this group, came a more well-defined scope and a credential called the Certified Professional Midwives (CPM). Nurses being trained as midwives was first promoted around 1914 but until the 1960’s they were only able to care for underserved populations in rural Appalachia, New Mexico or New York City (Varney, King, Brucker, Kriebs, & Fahey, 2015). By the 1980’s CNM’s were represented in a wide variety of clinical settings and continued to grow in numbers reaching a current estimate of 11,475 (ACNM,