While in the Shenandoah University Midwifery Initiative Program you will take your core graduate courses at your home university and the midwifery courses at Shenandoah University. Through the hybrid distance method you will come to SU only one week in the Fall semester and one week in the Spring semester and the rest of the time you will be at your clinical site which can be at a birth center, hospital, clinic, homes, military facilities, etc.

View collaborating schools: 

• George Washington University
• James Madison University
• Marshall University
• Old Dominion University
• West Virginia Wesleyan College 

Through our Midwifery Initiative (MI), we offer options to make curricula more accessible to students living and working in rural areas. Since the nurse-midwifery courses are isolated to the second year of study, we allow students from the collaborating universities listed above to take the core credits of their graduate degrees at their home universities in their first year of study and then complete the 19 credits of nurse-midwifery courses at Shenandoah in their second year.

Students in the MI are placed in clinical sites of their choosing or close to home. Upon completion of the program, MI students receive a Graduate Degree in Nursing from their home university with a Post Graduate Certificate in Midwifery from Shenandoah.

Nurse-Midwifery Specialty Courses for Post Graduate Certificate Students

The courses for this Certificate begin only in the Fall semester. They must be taken sequentially.

Graduate core courses will be taken at Home University.

Course	Title	Prerequisite	Credits	Semester
Semester 1
NM/ LB 610	Primary Care of Women	Core	2(1) *	Fall
NM/ LB 620	Comprehensive Antepartal Care	Core	2(1) *	Fall
Credits for Semester One			4(2) *
Semester 2
NM/ LB 630	Midwifery Practicum	610, 620	(3) *	Spring
NM/ LB 640	Comprehensive Perinatal Care	610, 620	2(1) **	Spring
Credits for Semester Two			2(4)
Semester 3
NM 660	Advanced Nurse-Midwifery Role Development	640	1	Summer
NM/ LB 651	Integrated Midwifery Internship	640	(5) **	Summer
NM 652	Evidence-Based Practice Project	640	1	Summer
Credits for Semester Three			2(5)**
Total Credits in Clinical Cohort			8(11)
Total Credits in Certificate			8(11)

 

* Courses that have both didactic & clinical credits. Clinical credits are in parenthesis.

** Normally, our clock hour to clinical credit is 4:1, however, in courses with an IP clinical component, # of experiences should be sufficient to meet students’ learning needs. The length & timing of birth is unpredictable, therefore students may require additional hours to gain enough experiences to successfully meet the ACNM Core Competencies for Basic Midwifery Practice 2012.

Shenandoah’s Midwifery Initiative is accredited by the Accreditation Commission for Midwifery Education (ACME). 

You have developed a very solid 
plan.. We understand that students who 
are concurrently enrolled in both the Shenandoah School of Nursing Post-Graduate Certificate midwifery program and the affiliated universities graduate nursing programs will be awarded the already ACME-accredited Post-Graduate Certificate. We want to congratulate you on your continued creativity in extending the opportunities for nurses to become nurse-midwives through these innovative affiliations with Schools of Nursing. We also congratulate you on your innovative curricular design.”

Accreditation Commission for Midwifery Education, 2013