One Of Our Own

Careers

Home > >

ONE OF OUR OWN

The following story originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Chicago Nurse's Lounge.

A Natural Trailblazer
St. Anthony Hospital’s Rosemary Meganck, APN, CNM

By Diana Mirel

After 30 years in nursing, certified nurse midwife, Rosemary Meganck, APN, CNM, has been involved in thousands of births, each one special and unique in its own way. But, this summer her role as a midwife became even more personal when she attended her first grandchild’s birth. “Of all of the births I have been involved with, this was the most rewarding, most spiritual, most emotional, most beautiful birth I have ever seen,” she shares. “To be able to catch my own granddaughter was the culmination of my 30 years of work.”

Meganck knew early on that she wanted to practice obstetric nursing, and midwifery was always in the back of her mind. She started out in pediatrics and made her way to labor and delivery, where she fell in love with OB nursing. After several years, she earned her master’s degree and became a nurse midwife. Throughout her career, Meganck has worked in hospitals, outpatient facilities and in home health care as a nurse, nurse midwife and administrator. Currently, she is the director of maternal and child services at Saint Anthony Hospital. While this is a full administration position, she still gets up on the floors every day to stay tuned to all the happenings.

Meganck’s professional life has been dedicated to improving health care, and her career has been marked by advocacy—for both patients and fellow nurses. Early on in her career, advanced practice nurses, which includes nurse midwives, were not statutorily recognized by the state. In the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, however, Meganck spearheaded a campaign to get a law passed for advanced practice nurses to be recognized with a separate license. “Up until that time, many people thought midwives just did home births and that we were unlicensed and, therefore, illegal,” says Meganck. “It was difficult to convince insurance companies, CEOs and physicians that we were a legitimate profession. So we went for statutory recognition with prescriptive authority to validate our profession.” When the law passed in 2001, Meganck was awarded the very first advanced practice nurse license in the state.

Today, Meganck makes it her mission to debunk misconceptions about midwives and get the word out about what they do. “I still run into people who say, ‘Oh, so you deliver babies at home,’” she says. “Clearly there are nurse midwives who do that, but only 5 percent of babies in Illinois are born at home and about 20 percent of babies in Illinois are born with a midwife in attendance. The vast majority are done in a hospital.”

The biggest challenge facing midwifery today is dealing with insurers and convincing them that nurse midwives deserve full reimbursement. “It is the same work that an obstetrician does in a low-risk pregnancy,” says Meganck. “When you’re comparing low-risk birth to low-risk birth, whether a physician does it or a midwife does it, it is exactly the same care and exactly the same work.”

Despite the challenges in midwifery, seeing a baby and “getting the trophy at the end” is an almost indescribable reward. “The biggest reward is when a patient is grateful that you have worked hard and she has worked hard and together you have brought a healthy baby into this world,” says Meganck.

To become a midwife today, nurses need to have a master’s degree. They then need to pass a national certification exam from the American College of Nurse Midwives and do continuing education to maintain their licensure every two years. Being very well known in the advanced practice nursing community, Meganck has mentored many new midwives and nurses going through midwifery school. “I always tell people that this can be the greatest reward in the world, but it is tiring,” she says. “You have to be dedicated and you have to want this.”

People skills and compassion are important traits to have to be a great midwife. “The word midwife means ‘with women,’ and that’s what you have to do,” says Meganck. “You have to be willing support them. You need to be patient because sometimes you may have to rub a back, wipe a brow and time contractions for hours on end. You have to want to be a nurturer.”

Above all else, Meganck stresses that nurses at every level have a responsibility to the patients, and that responsibility should be a nurse’s top priority. “Nurses are absolutely vital to patients’ well-beings,” she says. “I always tell nurses, don’t follow doctors’ orders blindly. Use your head. The nurse is the one who sees all the subspecialists and makes the calls, and the nurse is the one that has to be the patient advocate.”

If you would like to become "One of Our Own", click here...