 | Judy Mercer, director of the URI Nurse-Midwifery Program, and a patient at The Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket.
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Nurse-Midwifery Program awarded $810,839 federal grantThe University of Rhode Island has been awarded an $810,839 federal grant to continue its work as the only public university in New England to offer a master’s degree in nurse-midwifery.
The grant will bolster the URI Center for Nurse-Midwifery at Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island, its distance education collaboration with the University of Vermont, and its efforts to attract multicultural and multilingual students to the URI graduate program.
Since its establishment in 1993 within URI’s College of Nursing, the program has attracted $3.14 million in federal grants and graduated 45 nurse-midwives who now work in hospitals, private practices, university medical schools, military health care, clinics for the poor and with Native Americans. The program has the distinction of a 100 percent pass rate on the national certifying exam.
“This graduate program is very important to the college, as it prepares nurse midwives for advanced practice in nursing,” said Nursing Dean Dayle Joseph. “This is an important role in nursing and we are enthusiastic about the impact our graduates are making on practice. Funding from this grant provides us with an opportunity to educate the next generation of midwives, assuring a continued supply of practitioners.”
“This grant will fortify one of the foundations of our program—serving needy populations through the practice of our nurse-midwifery faculty and the preparation of graduate-level nurse midwives,” said Judy Mercer, associate professor at URI’s College of Nursing and director of its nurse-midwifery program. “In addition, our continuing work with the University of Vermont will substantially benefit rural populations. Our graduates’ commitment to serving the needy in our region and beyond is one of the attributes of our program that is a continuing source of pride.”
Mercer said the five primary objectives under the new three-year grant are:
• Enhance nurse-midwifery education at URI to improve access to quality women’s health care through preparation of culturally competent nurse-midwives and to achieve a 5 percent increase in minority or multicultural students.
• Maintain the collaboration with UVM and enhance the program through development and use of additional technologies for state-of-the art teaching and distance education. The collaborative program with UVM graduated its first midwifery student last spring. UVM does not have its own midwifery program.
• Enhance the primary care content in conjunction with the URI Nurse Practitioner Program, which also offers a master’s degree.
• Continue to develop the URI Center for Midwifery at Memorial Hospital.
• Continue and enhance the collaborative relationship with the Boston University, Baystate Medical Center and Yale University nurse-midwifery programs through additional use of distance technologies for shared teaching.
Mercer is a fellow in the American College of Nurse-Midwives and former director of the nurse-midwifery program at Georgetown University. She has been awarded a total of $5 million in grants during her career.
By Dave Lavallee
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