Heart to heart - fenton

Lauren Ulrich is a Certified Nurse-Midwife in St. Louis, MO, and received her MSN in Nurse-Midwifery in 2010 from Frontier Nursing University. She has been a Registered Nurse since 2004. 

Lauren has been passionate about childbirth and working with childbearing families since early childhood. She started her education on a pre-med track to become an obstetrician but realized she wanted to become a nurse-midwife instead. 

Lauren worked as a patient care tech on a medical-surgical unit while completing an accelerated baccalaureate nursing program with a focus in maternal-newborn nursing. She was hired as a staff nurse on a high-risk Labor & Delivery Unit, where she worked for several years. She became a doula to enhance her labor support skills, started a private doula practice, and began teaching childbirth and infant care classes before enrolling in Frontier Nursing University's nurse-midwifery program. 

Lauren is passionate about the midwifery model of care provided in home and birth center settings. She completed her midwifery training in 2010 at Colorado’s only free-standing birth center where she was trained to attend waterbirth and manage out-of-hospital emergencies. 

After graduating, Lauren began meeting with two organizations to start the first birth center in St. Louis, and was one of the first CNMs on staff. She has been adjunct faculty for St. Louis University, Maryville University, and Chamberlain's schools of nursing where she taught junior- and senior-level student nurses maternal-newborn nursing in clinical settings as well as in the schools' high-fidelity simulation centers. 

Lauren has been a nurse educator for the Women's & Infants unit at Barnes-Jewish Hospital where she taught Basic Life Support for Healthcare Providers, and Neonatal Resuscitation. She loves being an educator and teaching in clinical settings as well as running emergency skills drills. She is excited to be a preceptor for student nurse-midwives and share out of hospital midwifery skills with them. 

Lauren's philosophy of birth is to honor that pregnancy and birth are normal while serving as the guardian of wellness and safety throughout the process. She follows a functional medicine approach to health, appreciating that all body systems are interconnected and affected by each other. Her strengths are her quick wit, sense of humor, transparency, and ability to connect with others.