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Nurse-Midwifery

Nurse-midwives care for essentially healthy women before, during, and after childbirth, and provide gynecological care and family planning.  By working within a system that provides for physician consultation and referral for complications, nurse-midwives participate with other professionals in health planning for all women, thereby creating and instituting systems for the delivery of safe, cost-effective health care to all socioeconomic groups.  

In the Nurse-Midwifery Program, students are prepared for midwifery practice, which encompasses the provision of family-centered comprehensive care to women and their families across the lifespan. The program of study is designed to prepare students as highly competent clinicians, effective advocates for their clients, and skilled managers within the multiple systems that deliver health care to women and their families.

Graduates of this program have worked in a variety of settings and have included home-birth practitioners; practice directors for free-standing birth centers; directors of midwifery educational programs; and directors of CNM services in large teaching and small community hospitals.

An important feature of the program is its dual major. Upon completion of this program graduates are eligible for two national certifications.  They may  take the certification exam for Certified Nurse-Midwives given by the ACNM Certification Council (ACC).  They also may sit for the examination for certification as Women's Health Care Nurse Practitioners by the National Certification Corporation (NCC).

Click here for more information on course requirements and to view full and part-time plans of study for the Nurse-Midwifery Program.

"Penn's Midwifery Program exposed me to the best of the best in the field of midwifery.  In my current practice, I often recall the wisdom of my preceptors and the faculty members from my days in graduate school.  Their own research and personal knowledge of the latest findings and trends in health care, along with their adherence to the philosophy and beliefs of the art of midwifery, gave me the best of both worlds". 

-- Jill Pinover, CNM
    Class of 1997