Q&A with ‘Call The Midwife’ blogger and alum
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When UIC Nursing alum Katie Moriarty, PhD ’07, MS ’93, CNM, CAFCI, FACNM, RN, was asked to blog about the BBC TV show “Call the Midwife” from a modern-day midwife’s perspective, she jumped at the chance.
The show chronicles the experiences of nurses, midwives and nuns in London’s East End in the 1950s and 1960s. Moriarty, who is a faculty member at Frontier Nursing University, wanted to share her expertise from years of practicing in a variety of settings – hospitals, birth centers and home births. She also felt her background as a dual American-Canadian citizen gave her good insight into the socialized medicine portrayed on the show.
Moriarty started out blogging for Detroit Public Television in the show’s second season (2013) and the blog was such a success that it was picked up by PBS in 2015. For the last 12 seasons, she’s been sharing her insights on midwifery education, changing obstetric practices, and much more. You can catch her and three other midwives taking turns blogging on the Modern Midwives Blog after each episode of the show, now in its 13th season.
UIC Nursing: How did you get started blogging about the show?
Katie Moriarty (K.M.): It was actually Detroit Public Television (DPTV) that initially started out wanting a blog. They approached the University of Michigan asking if a professor wanted to blog. I had worked at Detroit Medical Center at the Hutzel Women’s Hospital, which was the third largest practice in the U.S. The certified nurse practitioners attended 2,000 births a year. I really wanted to blog as I had experiences with assisting women in labor and birth in varied settings and locations–including community settings. I had been a ‘boots on the ground’ midwife, an educator, and an administrator, and those varied positions were highlighted in the show with the characters. The blog was put out on a local level of DPTV but then the national PBS read our posts and loved them and picked it up.
UIC Nursing: What has the reaction been to your blog entries? Have you gotten any interesting responses?
K.M.: We have had fabulous reactions. It is funny because my students act like we [the bloggers] are celebrities. Once, I was on an airplane and, during the flight, I mentioned to the woman beside me that I was a midwife. She said she loved the show “Call the Midwife” and even reads the blog. I told her my name and that I was one of the midwives who writes the PBS blog. She shouted a couple of rows back to her husband: “This is Katie Moriarty! She writes the blog for ‘Call the Midwife’!”
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UIC Nursing: How accurately do you think the show portrays midwifery (for the time period)?
K.M.: The show is very accurate and I actually blogged about that at the beginning of this season. They have these new characters on this season — midwifery students — and, in one scene, they were studying. I stopped the show and zoomed in on their textbooks to see what they were using. I wanted to see if they used the same text [that I used during my undergraduate education in Canada] and the correct edition for that time [1969]. It was! That is how accurate they are.
UIC Nursing: Can you share any highlights from your time in the UIC Nursing master’s program?
K.M.: I chose to go to UIC after being offered a traineeship there, and I am so happy that I did. I wanted to be a clinical nurse specialist at that time and was focusing on high-risk OB. It was my professor, Sabina Dambrauskas [MS ’76, BSN ’68] who wrote on one of my papers: “You should consider becoming a midwife. You have the heart of a midwife.” That statement had an impact on me. I talked with my family and decided to complete the master’s degree requirements for both programs (perinatal nursing and nurse midwifery), and proudly became a certified nurse midwife. You see how important the words of your professors can be.
UIC Nursing: Tell us about how your training informed your clinical practice.
K.M.: I went on to use a lot of acupuncture in my clinical practice. It’s so helpful for many common discomforts of pregnancy, like nausea and vomiting, sciatica, and carpal tunnel syndrome. I offered moxibustion for breech births and pre-birth treatments for cervical ripening. My cesarian rate was about 5% after I really started to incorporate acupuncture. I also used acupuncture and acupressure if a woman wanted to try it for labor augmentation.
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UIC Nursing: Where did you practice after becoming a nurse-midwife?
K.M.: I moved away from Chicago and worked in Detroit and then in Tucson. Then one of my prior professors, Betty Schlatter [PhD ’90, director of the nurse-midwifery program at UIC from 1989 to 1995] contacted me and asked if I would be open to relocating to Illinois and joining their practice at Illinois Masonic Medical Center.
UIC Nursing: Why did you choose to return for your PhD? What was your focus in that program?
K.M.: One time, at a midwifery staff meeting, I noticed our cesarian section rate had gone up from about 10% to about 15%. I found that alarming and thought, “What happened?” For some, it may have just been a conversation, but for me, I started to explore. I went back and looked at our monthly rates and national rates over time. Then I started to think of changes in clinical practices that could have impacted this rise in rates nationally. I wondered if there were things we could do to help encourage labor more naturally.
When I went back to UIC for my PhD, professor Janet Engstrom [PhD ’85, MS ’81, nurse-midwifery program director from 1998 to 2005] encouraged me to apply for a traineeship; it was called the Ruth L. Kirchstein National Research Service Award Predoctoral Biobehavioral Traineeship [a T32 Grant]. I got my certification from the Acupuncture Foundation of Canada Institute, now called Acupuncture Canada. I was the first midwife to ever attend their certification program! My dissertation explored psychophysiological responses to an acupressure treatment used as a pre-birth treatment. Dorie Schwertz was my advisor.
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UIC Nursing: Has anyone from the show ever contacted you to consult or to react to your blogs?
K.M.: On the 10th anniversary of the show, the four “modern-day midwives” [who write the blog] were interviewed [by PBS] and also a couple of the actors. It was an honor to get to meet them. After that, a couple of articles came out in the British press and at times have incorporated our take on things. That was funny to see.
It is a fabulous show that really has relevance. It’s hard to believe it is in its 13th season. I love being a midwife. I feel lucky to have had a career where I’ve had positions as a clinician, administrator, and now as an educator, where I get to “midwife” students into their role.