Midwife Tutor

“I knew without a doubt that I wanted to be a midwife after a nurse-midwife from the Frontier Nursing Service spoke to my senior nursing class at Vanderbilt about her experiences as a midwife. My course was firmly set after that lecture and my journey has been even more enriching, exciting, and challenging than I could ever have imagined that day in 1973.”

Vicki completed the course work for her master’s degree in maternal-child nursing and the midwifery component from the U. of Illinois in December, 1976. She received her MSN in 1979, after finishing the thesis requirement. Like her cat, her career path has had many lives, leading her to a variety of clinical practice settings: from in-hospital to out-of-hospital at a freestanding birth center (where she was also a customer, giving birth there to her three children), from inner-city indigent care to serving insured women in private practice. Additionally, Vicki has been involved in graduate nursing education, both academically and clinically. She was a “CNEP Pioneer”, serving as a founding faculty member of Frontier’s distance education program, where she was Course Coordinator for the Health Assessment and Intrapartum Series courses, and later as an Antepartum Series course instructor, under the leadership of none other than Cindy Farley. Vicki has a strong commitment to clinical midwifery education and has been a clinical preceptor for many nurse-midwifery and other advanced practice nursing students throughout her career.

Currently, Vicki provides full-scope midwifery care with five other wonderful “sage-femmes” (midwife in French, literally “wise women”) and seven terrific physicians, serving an indigent population at a regional hospital on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia. She loves what she does, never tiring of those special moments when a midwife knows she’s made a difference in not only a woman and newborn’s immediate experience, but can sense she’s provided encouragement and nourishment to a woman at this season of her life journey. Her desire is to give that same encouragement and nourishment to midwifery students so that they will, in turn, be “sage-femmes” to many, many others.

Vicki is almost an empty nester, living outside of Atlanta with her husband Rick, son Stephen (a senior in high school), a cat, dog, and some fish (which somehow she always ends up feeding). Two older daughters, Emily and Becca, are launched and thriving.