An Academic Midwifery Fellowship: Addressing a Need for Junior Faculty Development and Interprofessional Education

The University of Colorado College of Nursing crafted a midwifery fellowship to address a local need to recruit junior faculty into a large practice caring primarily for an underserved, at-risk population. Additional goals for the fellowship included promoting retention and development of interprofessional education teams. The curriculum design drew heavily from 2 national initiatives: (1) the Institute of Medicine's call for nursing residencies to support the transition to advanced practice and build expertise in navigating health systems and caring for patients with complex needs and (2) the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and American College of Nurse-Midwives collaboration to address maternity care workforce shortages by building clinically-based interprofessional teams. The fellowship uses Melei's transitions theory and Jean Watson's Theory of Human Caring as frameworks to understand the fellows experience in the 12-month program. Fellow competencies concentrate on 7 core components: clinical, professional, intrapersonal, mentorship, interprofessional, low-resource setting, and leadership. Program evaluation is in process with the aim of understanding if the fellowship improves confidence and competence for the newly graduated nurse-midwife, and a change in attitude toward interprofessional teams. Of the 5 fellows who completed the midwifery fellowship over 4 years, 2 now have faculty positions within the practice and 4 of the 5 were offered positions. Common themes from the fellows' reflection journals and mentorship meetings include the importance of mentorship in clinical and professional growth. Further program evaluation is needed to better understand the efficacy of program components in meeting the objectives to recruit and retain faculty and promote interprofessional education. Academic midwifery fellowships with interprofessional components may be an innovative recruitment technique for clinical faculty.