Helen Sirica, CNM

Bio

I have been a Certified Nurse Midwife since 1980. I received my nursing, then my maternal/child health training from Yale University. My interest in nursing and midwifery, however, began while I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Dahomey (now Benin), West Africa in 1973.

In the Peace Corps, I taught English as a Second Language in a secondary school in West Africa. While I was there, I made the acquaintance of two midwives and a doctor from UCSF who were doing an international health project in my country. They were working to improve the skills of traditional midwives and healers in Dahomey. In observing their work, I came to understand and to embrace midwifery as my calling in life.

I returned to the USA to study nursing and midwifery. After my studies, I devoted my clinical practice at home to work in non-profit health clinics in under-served medical areas. In 1982, I did return to West Africa as a nurse midwife. Until 1988, when I became a mother, I worked in Africa to improve the quality of health care on that continent. That long experience in the Third World has been the grounding for much of what I hold dear in my work today. Giving birth is sacred everywhere on the planet.

To this sacred end, I devote myself. At Kaiser, we are blessed with the possibility of a safe and caring prenatal and birth experience. I am happy to be part of a caring and devoted birthing team here at Kaiser Santa Rosa.

I have been a Kaiser employee since 1991, first in San Jose, then here in Santa Rosa. For my part as a nurse midwife, I contribute as part of the OB team at Kaiser Santa Rosa a serenity and peace with pregnancy and birth that is very grounding and therapeutic and a high level of clinical expertise after twenty-five years of clinical practice around the world.

I would like the birth a a child to be a great adventure and odyssey of learning for everyone in the birthing family. I would like this especially for mothers.

I would like a mother to feel, after the birth of her child, that she had done the best she knew how and that she was satisfied with her efforts and overwhelmed with joy. I love children and women and mothers. And I love being a mother myself. Being a mother is the standard of everything great in my life. As a midwife, I want us all to celebrate this standard and this joy because it is good for our health.