Midwife Accreditation
The Certified Professional Midwife (CPM) credential was created in response to a national need which was not being filled by obstetricians, nurse-midwives, or other maternity care providers – that of a midwife focused solely on people with healthy pregnancies planning to give birth at home or in a freestanding birth center. Known as Licensed Certified Professional Midwives (LCPM) in Illinois, CPMs work within the community; their education is distinct from nursing, by focusing low risk, out-of-hospital midwifery care and incorporating elements of doula, lactation consultant and birth assistant training.
The CPM is often confused with the Certified Nurse-Midwife (CNM). Although the two professions share the designation “midwife,” each has a unique educational pathway with separate national accreditation and certification agencies; they are regulated in the state by different professional boards under separate licensing acts, and have overlapping but not identical scopes of practice. CPMs undergo clinical and didactic training to prepare them as specialists in the provision of maternity care in community settings. The program that Holistic Birth Collective (HBC) envisions would prepare students to qualify for the national board exam for the CPM credential and meet all requirements to obtain their Illinois midwifery license.
In its 2018 Illinois Maternal Morbidity and Mortality Report, the Department of Public Health reported that Black women were 6 times as likely to die from a pregnancy-related condition as white women, and that in Illinois, 72% of pregnancy-related deaths and 93% of violent pregnancy-associated deaths were deemed preventable. IDPH also found that between 2016 and 2017, Black women had the highest rate of severe maternal morbidity with a rate of 101.5 per 10,000 deliveries, which is almost 3 times as high as the rate for white women.
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