Exploring Life & Business with Tiffany Jorgenson of Mountain Miracles Midwifery

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tiffany Jorgenson.

Hi Tiffany, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today.
I had always wanted to do home birth and be a midwife; I just didn’t know what that would look like for me. I decided the best route would be to go to nursing school to at least get my foot in the door! During nursing school, I met a provider who was a nurse-midwife. I had never heard of this route for midwifery care and she shared with me her experience and the path I could take to pursue this option. After several months of research, I submitted my application to Frontier Nursing University and 2.5 years later I graduated with my master’s in nursing with a specialty in midwifery. Upon graduation, I assumed I’d get a traditional job in the hospital for a few years to build my experience before I started a home birth practice but everything was stacked against me and I couldn’t find any job that wasn’t an hour-long commute to Denver. With much prayer and consideration, I made the decision to open my home birth practice and in March 2015, my practice became official! In 2018, I added my first midwife colleague to help lessen the load of the practice and now in 2022, we are a fully functioning and very busy home birth nurse-midwifery practice catching an average of 190 babies a year at home! We are fully staffed with 4 nurse-midwives and 7 nurses/birth assistants.

When I started my practice, I was the only nurse-midwife in southern CO providing home birth and the only one who was taking insurance from most major insurance companies which is what really set us apart from other home birth midwifery practices in Colorado Springs. Our contribution to this awesome community is providing client’s incredibly safe care while in the comfort of their home where they can use their health insurance to cover the majority of the cost of their care! Now we are the busiest nurse-midwifery-ran home birth practice in the state of Colorado and one of the busiest in the nation and we have been so incredibly honored to serve our families in this capacity!

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
The biggest struggle along the way was finding midwives who understood the demand for home birth care and what working in that kind of practice entails. Home birth midwifery is incredibly demanding and takes a huge emotional and mental toll because we have to play many different roles that would be staffed by 2-3 people in a facility setting.

We have had some midwives come and go and many contributed greatly to our practice but ultimately, it just wasn’t a good fit for them, and we had to find someone who was a better fit. Our current team does seem to be amazing and we are well on our way to having solid staffing for the next 2 years!

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We are a certified nurse-midwifery-owned home birth practice that has been in practice since March of 2015. We service the front range in a 90-minute radius around our office location which puts us as north as Denver, as south as Canon City/Pueblo, as west as Florrisant, and east to Calhan, Yoder. We provide pregnancy, birth, and postpartum care, newborn care for the first 28 days of life, and well-woman/primary care as well.

We are a special home birth practice because we are owned and run by nurse-midwives which is not a commonplace practice for nurse-midwives. Safety is our number one priority and we monitor our clients very closely between our 4 midwives to make sure our clients are receiving top-tier care in the out-of-hospital setting and not missing out on anything they want or need that they could easily access in a facility setting. We produce excellent stats yearly and I am very proud of the safe space we have provided for the women in our community to have access to out-of-hospital care for the last 8 years.

The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you and are any important lessons or epiphanies you can share with us?
We have learned that people discovered that hospitals could be a breeding ground for germs and they didn’t want to risk contracting COVID because they were birthing in the hospital setting instead of in the safety of their homes! Our practice actually exploded in 2020 and our numbers literally doubled with the number of people flocking to out-of-hospital birth settings. The pandemic literally changed the way our practice operated, forcing us to add more midwives to meet the demand of the community around us.

It also opened up the world of telehealth medicine to us. We didn’t typically offer virtual visits but with the onset of COVID, we had to get creative to make sure our clients were still receiving high-quality care while also protecting the safety of our staff and the other clients we cared for. It allowed us to begin serving clients who lived farther away and make it more convenient for their schedule and less stressful on their pregnancy to commute up to 90 minutes for every appointment.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://mountainmiraclesmidwifery.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mountainmiraclesmidwifery/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mountainmiraclesmidwifery