RUMFORD – Nurse-midwives of the Central Maine Medical Family are being saluted Oct. 3 to Oct. 9 during National Nurse-Midwifery Week. The week’s theme, “With Women for a Lifetime,” illustrates that midwives don’t just deliver babies but treat women of all ages from adolescence to geriatrics with a variety of health concerns.

“My oldest patient is 90,” says Daisy Goodman, Certified Nurse-Midwife and Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner. “My youngest are adolescents.” She is one of eight primary health care providers at Swift River Health Care and Elsemore Dixfield Center.

Certified Nurse-Midwives are registered nurses who have earned masters degrees in midwifery. In addition to prenatal care and delivery, they routinely perform gynecologic care, cancer screening and perimenopausal care.

The midwifery philosophy of care is based in the support of natural processes. “It’s that philosophy that led me to complete the courses in herbal medicines,” Goodman says, but midwives also have the ability to intervene with the tools of modern medicine, if needed.”

A special part of Goodman’s practice is Centering Pregnancy, a prenatal care option that brings women and their support persons together as a group with Goodman and nurses from the Rumford Hospital Birthing Center. “Centering Pregnancy moves health care out of the exam room and into a comfortable group setting,” she explains. “It provides support as well as a high level of prenatal care.” The Centering program, developed by a nurse-midwife, has recently won national recognition for contributing to excellent pregnancy outcomes.

“Centering gives providers, women and their families more time together to really get to know each other,” says Goodman. In Centering, women experience increased participation in their own health care, as well. “I always learn from women in this setting, and one of the things I learned is that health care could benefit from more groups of this nature, where patients who share a diagnosis support one another,” she adds.

Goodman received her associate’s degree in nursing (RN) from New Hampshire Community Technical College, her certificate in nurse-midwifery from Frontier School of Midwifery and Family Nursing in Kentucky, where she also graduated from the Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner Program, and her Master’s in Nurse-Midwifery from the Stoneybrook School of Nursing, State University of New York.

Goodman also has completed a 250-hour course in herbal medicine.