Juliana van Olphen Fehr is a Professor Emerita and is the founder of the Nurse-Midwifery Education Program, in the School of Nursing, at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia, USA, where she was the Program Director for 20 years. She received her Bachelor degrees in Special Education from Virginia Commonwealth University, and in Nursing from University of Virginia. She completed her Master’s degree in Nurse-Midwifery at Georgetown University and her PhD from George Mason University. Her dissertation was titled “The Caring Relationship between Midwife and Woman during Childbirth. During her 14 years as a midwife caring for women at home and she also started an in-hospital “not-for-profit” birthing center. Over the years she was appointed by three of Virginia’s governors to serve on committees that were focused on increasing access to maternity care for those living in Virginia’s rural areas. While serving as Program Director at Shenandoah University, she taught her students to use the Optimality Index-US to recognize and implement evidence-based practices based in evidence to promote optimal outcomes that would facilitate physiological childbearing. She later published a study that assessed the feasibility of using this instrument for education and training as well as maintaining its original function as a performance measurement tool. (Fehr, J. Using the Optimality Index–US to teach midwifery students to recognize and implement evidence-based practices that promote optimal outcomes in perinatal health. Journal of Nurse-Midwifery and Women’s Health. 2013; 58(5): 531-537.)
