One of the School of Nursing's best-kept secrets might be their midwifery master's program, which offers different options for students interested in the medical field.
While many at Penn are unaware of the program entirely and may think of midwifery as an outdated practice, the program has been gaining national prominence.
Rated first by U.S. News and World Report for the past 10 years, the Penn midwifery program includes various avenues of health care, not only child delivery, as often assumed.
"When a lot of people find out about [midwifery] at Penn, they are surprised that it is a modern practice as well as a historic one," said Bill McCool, director of the Nurse-Midwifery Program.
Yet for the students involved with the program, midwifery offers diverse options in contemporary health care.
"I got interested in midwifery through my sister because she had three children through midwifery," program participant Susanne McIlvenna said. "It was the first time I had heard of midwifery in the hospital setting."
"The midwifery program that allows you the most options was the program at Penn, because they offer a dual Nurse Practitioner and Midwifery degree, which is nice because you have more flexibility," she added.
The midwifery program is designed for students who have their bachelor's of science in Nursing. Students with a bachelor's degree outside of nursing can apply as an accelerated candidate to the B.S.N./M.S.N. program in order to eventually enter the master's level midwifery program.
The program itself can be completed in 20 months if one is enrolled as a full-time student, but there is the option to enroll part-time. The Nurse-Midwifery Program consists of four core courses, six theory courses and seven clinical courses.
"In terms of education, the two main things we emphasize [are] a variety of experience -- including home birth, birth center [and] tertiary care center because midwifery covers all of those arenas," McCool said. "We put a lot of emphasis on policy and women's health care."
The program is designed to educate students on the immediate, medical aspects of the field as well as the politics that govern midwifery's legal jurisdiction.
Nursing sophomore Kelley Martin is applying to the midwifery program with the knowledge that she will have diversity in her experience because of the training that the degree and certification give.
"What's unique about the midwifery program at Penn is that you also get certified in women's health -- which no other university does. So as a midwife [from] Penn, you can also do pap smears for women," as well as perform other health care practices for women, Martin said. "So a lot of women have decided that they want to keep their midwife as their women's health practitioner."
McCool stresses that students deciding between different areas of nursing and medicine should pinpoint what area they are most interested in and what role they want to play in women's lives.
"Do they want to practice according to the medical or midwifery model? You have to think of how you want to offer care and how your lifestyle will be," McCool said. "One thing that people often mistake about midwifery is that they are limited to childbirth, but we have the saying that we take women from adolescence to senescence."
