At St. Kate's, Whitby is the hub for all nursing courses.
In July, the Star Tribune featured St. Catherine University alumna Andrea Engdahl ’08 in a profile highlighting her career as a nurse midwife at M Health Fairview Clinic-Riverside and Masonic Children’s Hospital. In the piece, Engdahl relayed differences between her position and an OB-GYN and how her typical day on the job looks.
While OB-GYN primarily focuses on providing care during pregnancy and postpartum, nurse midwives like Engdahl undertake a full spectrum of support for women. If she isn’t helping deliver babies and visiting postpartum patients, a typical day at the clinic might include prenatal visits or the standard annual exam. Whether it’s a teenager entering puberty, woman undergoing menopause, or birthing support, Engdahl is there to provide care, and to get to know her patients on a longer-term basis.
“We have seven midwives on our team, and we take turns doing 24-hour call shifts. We encourage our patients to try to meet everyone throughout their pregnancy so that when they come to have their baby, they’ve got a familiar face there with them,” Engdahl said to Emma Nelson of the Star Tribune. “It’s pretty rare that I go into birth with a patient that I haven’t met before.”
Helping with childbirth, though not the bulk of Engdahl’s job, is a key component of her work. “I always say, if I ever stop being amazed at this process, I would need to find a new job.”
Alongside being a St. Kate’s alumna, Engdahl worked as an adjunct faculty in the Master of Science in Nursing: Entry Level program from 2016 to 2023. In this position, she did clinical instruction in maternal child health in acute care settings, and lab instruction in the same clinical specialty.