More About Rosemary Senjem

Midwifery Bound for the Community-Based
Nurse-Midwifery Education Program

Desire:

When people really want to do something, doing it BIG sometimes helps them do it at all.

In I was invited to design and run an annual orientation program for students and faculty of the first class of the Community-based Nurse-midwifery Education Program (CNEP). The stated goal of the program was to produce 10,000 nurse-midwives by 2001 with exponential growth through distance learning.

Focus:

We knew that it would be tough for students in the first class of the first program of this kind. Where would their support come from? How would they stay motivated to finish?

Opportunities:

At the time, the demand for nurse-midwives was exceeding supply from the fifty campus-based university graduate programs where enrollment was restricted to small classes of six to twelve students. And there was an increasing need for educating nurse-midwives with an entrepreneurial spirit to meet the growing demand for more freestanding birth centers. Out of these needs the first distance learning program for nurse-midwifery was born - even before the Internet was in full swing. There were no models to follow for this clinical teaching program.

The faculty for this first class were the best in this field, drawn together by the opportunity to create something really BIG and GOOD together.

This orientation weekend was a time for community building and committing to the program. I knew we would have the most success if we used the principles of inclusion and creativity, and engaged as much of each person as possible in the weekend. (This means all sides of the brain, body and spirit.)

Process:

We laughed, cried, created and committed. At the end of the weekend, the students had even written the school song!

Results:

This program is a successful graduate-level, distance-learning program for nurses who want to become nurse-midwives, at the Frontier School of Midwifery and Family Nursing. The program's graduation rate is examplary and most of those graduates are running their own practices and birth centers. Yes, you guessed it! They are Inspired Entrepreneurs!

What do you want to do BIG?

 

* - CNEP image used with permission.