During a visit to the clinic on Patrick Street, FamilyCare CEO Martha Carter updated personnel on the progress of the transition to electronic medical records. The switch will make space-consuming files like these obsolete.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- There's a serenity about her, a calm confidence that instills trust, whether she's birthing a baby or building a health-care business.
She was shaped by a tumultuous era of unrest and change, influenced by the women's movement, the battle for civil rights and opposition to an unwinnable war. Ideals of social justice spawned a career based on the universal need for proper health care.
In 1986, Cincinnati native Martha Carter arrived here to work as a certified nurse midwife at a Teays Valley birth center. She spearheaded the center's expansion to WomenCare and now, FamilyCare.
As FamilyCare's CEO, she oversees seven federally funded nonprofit clinics in Charleston, Teays Valley and Madison, as well as an eighth facility underway in Eleanor. Nearly 24,000 patients use the clinics every year, people of all ages, people with and without insurance.
She was drawn to West Virginia by the friends who established Amalgamated Coon in Putnam County, a 70s-era back-to-the-land community. Fate, in its convoluted way, generally pulls us where we belong.
She's 57.
"I grew up in Cincinnati in the late 60s and early 70s. There was a lot of change at that time. I had no clue what I wanted to be. I was an English major at Xavier University and dropped out of school after a year. I was influenced by the times, not just the hippie movement, but the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the war.
"The women's movement probably influenced me more than anything. Women were exploring their bodies and taking control of their bodies, and I think that was influential in what I wound up doing, which is being a midwife.
"After I dropped out of college, I started working. Waiting tables is kind of fun because it's immediate gratification. You take money home at the end of the day. Then I worked in a nursing home. From there, I got a job in an OB-GYN office, taking blood pressures and putting patients in rooms.
"That was the early 70s. The OB doctor I worked for got me into the hospital a couple of times at midnight to watch a delivery. That was the age when women were still using twilight sleep and were not aware. Women I had gotten to know in the office prenatally as intelligent and informed were essentially not present for the birth of their babies because of the drugs. The doctor came in and used forceps, and dad was out in the waiting room. That really affected me. There had to be a better way.
"Nurse midwives are registered nurses with additional training to deliver babies and provide women's health care. I decided that's what I was going to do. I went to nursing school in Cincinnati. Because of what was going on in obstetrics at the time, women and families were choosing to have their babies at home. In the middle to late 70s, there was a big growth in home births.
"Some friends who decided to have their baby at home invited me to be there with the lay midwife. The lay midwife didn't make it. I caught that baby. That was March of 1977, my first delivery. I started working with people who were attending births at home.
"While in nursing school, I hooked up with an OB-GYN physician who was attending home births for members of his church group, sort of an alternative congregation. He realized he didn't know hardly anything about home births. He actually had the humility to team up with some lay midwives to put together a home-birth program, and I was in that mix.
"The doctor came to the first 100 births with the lay midwives, then eventually only came when we needed him. I learned more from him in some ways than I learned in midwifery school because he was old school, not a lot of technology. He knew how to turn babies and had a lot of hand skills.
"I decided to get a formal education as a nurse midwife. I went to Newark, N.J., where midwives took care of young women 16 and under having babies. I was delivering the second babies of girls 14 and 16 in the teen clinic.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- There's a serenity about her, a calm confidence that instills trust, whether she's birthing a baby or building a health-care business.
She was shaped by a tumultuous era of unrest and change, influenced by the women's movement, the battle for civil rights and opposition to an unwinnable war. Ideals of social justice spawned a career based on the universal need for proper health care.
In 1986, Cincinnati native Martha Carter arrived here to work as a certified nurse midwife at a Teays Valley birth center. She spearheaded the center's expansion to WomenCare and now, FamilyCare.
As FamilyCare's CEO, she oversees seven federally funded nonprofit clinics in Charleston, Teays Valley and Madison, as well as an eighth facility underway in Eleanor. Nearly 24,000 patients use the clinics every year, people of all ages, people with and without insurance.
She was drawn to West Virginia by the friends who established Amalgamated Coon in Putnam County, a 70s-era back-to-the-land community. Fate, in its convoluted way, generally pulls us where we belong.
She's 57.
"I grew up in Cincinnati in the late 60s and early 70s. There was a lot of change at that time. I had no clue what I wanted to be. I was an English major at Xavier University and dropped out of school after a year. I was influenced by the times, not just the hippie movement, but the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the war.
"The women's movement probably influenced me more than anything. Women were exploring their bodies and taking control of their bodies, and I think that was influential in what I wound up doing, which is being a midwife.
"After I dropped out of college, I started working. Waiting tables is kind of fun because it's immediate gratification. You take money home at the end of the day. Then I worked in a nursing home. From there, I got a job in an OB-GYN office, taking blood pressures and putting patients in rooms.
"That was the early 70s. The OB doctor I worked for got me into the hospital a couple of times at midnight to watch a delivery. That was the age when women were still using twilight sleep and were not aware. Women I had gotten to know in the office prenatally as intelligent and informed were essentially not present for the birth of their babies because of the drugs. The doctor came in and used forceps, and dad was out in the waiting room. That really affected me. There had to be a better way.
"Nurse midwives are registered nurses with additional training to deliver babies and provide women's health care. I decided that's what I was going to do. I went to nursing school in Cincinnati. Because of what was going on in obstetrics at the time, women and families were choosing to have their babies at home. In the middle to late 70s, there was a big growth in home births.
"Some friends who decided to have their baby at home invited me to be there with the lay midwife. The lay midwife didn't make it. I caught that baby. That was March of 1977, my first delivery. I started working with people who were attending births at home.
"While in nursing school, I hooked up with an OB-GYN physician who was attending home births for members of his church group, sort of an alternative congregation. He realized he didn't know hardly anything about home births. He actually had the humility to team up with some lay midwives to put together a home-birth program, and I was in that mix.
"The doctor came to the first 100 births with the lay midwives, then eventually only came when we needed him. I learned more from him in some ways than I learned in midwifery school because he was old school, not a lot of technology. He knew how to turn babies and had a lot of hand skills.
"I decided to get a formal education as a nurse midwife. I went to Newark, N.J., where midwives took care of young women 16 and under having babies. I was delivering the second babies of girls 14 and 16 in the teen clinic.
"My husband at the time decided to go to school, so we moved to Lexington and I started a home-birth practice there. We moved to Lebanon, Ohio, where I had my second baby. I set up a little office in Lebanon.
"Then we were at a crossroads. I wasn't making enough money in my home-birth practice to sustain us. He was a physician's assistant and one job ended, and we were at loose ends. In the meantime, we had met people from West Virginia, the Putnam County Pickers. They came to Cincinnati to play. That was 1973.
"Ron Sowell and Sandy Sowell lived in Cincinnati for a while and ran a small nightclub, a music venue. They told us about this place in West Virginia where people were living up a dirt road. We call it Amalgamated Coon. A group actually owns 50-some acres together. I bought into the land. We moved here to live in that community in 1986.
"I love the community where I live. It's not often you can pick your neighbors. These people are pretty interesting -- artists and activists, people who have really engaged in the community and contributed a lot.
"They had some rough times out there. Used to be, you had to walk up the road we drive up now. People had built their own houses by the time I moved here. I insisted on running a gas line so we could have gas. We still drink rainwater. I actually like being able to survive. When the power was out for a week this winter, we were fine. We built the house knowing that we were likely to have to live off the grid.
"My husband and I and our two children rented a house in Hurricane and built a house at the farm. I didn't come here until a job was open. A group of physicians had started a birth center in Teays Valley in 1984. I was ready to stop running around the countryside delivering babies at home. It was too hard with two children to be gone that much, so I was interested in working in a situation where I had another midwife to trade off calls with. So we took a leap and did it.
"The women we were working with at the center told us they wanted the same kind of care for their families. We were able to take care of women whether they were insured or uninsured. And we had already expanded from prenatal care to gynecology. The state family planning program allowed us to do pap smears and birth control at very reduced rates. So it was just a natural extension to say the whole family really needs this kind of care.
"From my roots in terms of civil rights, it was important to me to be able to offer good health care for everybody. That's a basic right. We've got to be able to take care of our bodies. That comes before anything else.
"The physicians who owned the birth center wanted out of the business. Another midwife, Lisa Dalporto, and I decided to incorporate as a nonprofit and turn it into WomenCare. Lisa's sister, Susan, was an attorney and was helping us. Then Susan got sick, and Lisa stopped working to take care of her and her daughter. So I carried on and became the director. We formed a steering committee and a board, and incorporated in 1989. So we are 20 years old.
"We wanted to grow and didn't have the capital to do that. We became part of CAMC for 18 months. Once we joined CAMC, we didn't qualify for grants. Everyone thought CAMC would take care of it. We had an amicable split from CAMC to qualify for the funding we needed to take care of low-income people. In the meantime, I had divorced and remarried and had another baby at 43.
"We were still looking for ways to expand, and figured out we would become a federally qualified health center. We'd get cost-based reimbursement for Medicaid and Medicare and a federal grant to take care of uninsured and underinsured people.
"In 2001, we got the federal grant which gave us funding for Teays Valley and the birth center and helped us open the Schoenbaum Center. We added dental care at Schoenbaum in 2003.
"Now we have seven clinics, going on eight. We bought an old hardware store in Eleanor, and the contractor started two weeks ago.
"I stopped attending births when my child was about 2. I miss it a little. Now it's mostly administration. I came to a point where I could either grow the organization way I thought it needed to be grown or I could stay in clinical practice. It seemed like I could help more people if I could grow the business.
"I love to bike ride and contra dance -- and I love to travel. My middle daughter and I went to France and Spain for two weeks and had a blast. I also love being at home. We live on a ridgetop. I look out over my front window and I see hills and mists, and it's gorgeous.
"This is my 30th anniversary of when I became a nurse and a midwife. Even though I'm not in clinical practice, I think the things I'm doing are very congruent with nursing and nurse midwifery."
Reach Sandy Wells at san...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5173.
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