A practicing midwife and a business and data operator

Molly Ries is a practicing senior midwife who helps rural and critical access hospitals start, rebuild and sustain midwifery-led obstetric care. She brings twelve years of experience in full-scope midwifery, eight as a family nurse practitioner caring for patients of all ages, and four as a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner with a special focus on perinatal mental health. She still practices today, so the programs she designs come from someone who works inside them.

Molly knows what it takes to bring a midwifery service back. She spent five years at a rural Minnesota critical access hospital, restoring a midwifery service that had lost all of its midwives. She helped shape how the service grew, taught nurses to work alongside midwives, and precepted on site.

She has also led the introduction of new services. Molly led the effort to bring waterbirth to that hospital in 2020, its first, working through the nursing education, protocol and physician buy-in that a critical access hospital needs before it can offer it. She was also the driving force behind bringing nitrous oxide for labor to the unit, and she has direct, hands-on experience with waterbirth, nitrous oxide and Centering group prenatal care.

For much of her career, Molly has precepted graduate nurse-midwifery students for multiple universities, including as adjunct clinical faculty. Because these are distance-education programs, the preceptor is the student’s primary hands-on instructor. That experience informs how she mentors a new midwife through the first year in a hospital.

Molly continues to practice as a working midwife and nurse practitioner, providing labor and delivery care as well as urgent and primary care across the lifespan. She currently provides locum coverage for hospital obstetric units, and has done so in more than one state.

Her psychiatric training adds a second strength. Molly has seen an enormous need for quality mental healthcare among antepartum and postpartum patients, and she believes women should never feel pressure to ignore legitimate mental health concerns in order to protect the baby. Mental illness during pregnancy is common, and with careful management, treatment, including medication, is often possible while protecting the baby. She has worked with patients struggling with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, PTSD and ADHD, and she takes a personal approach to each, because everyone responds to medication differently.

Molly calls midwifery “her first love.” A farmer’s daughter from a small town in Illinois, she accompanied her mother on prenatal visits for her younger siblings as a teenager, and the work of that exceptional midwife inspired Molly’s own single-minded focus on the calling. She began her career as a labor and delivery nurse, and went on to earn national certification as a Certified Nurse-Midwife, Family Nurse Practitioner and Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner.

Molly herself is a mother of eleven children, and has personal experience with postpartum depression. She brings a personal understanding to her patients’ struggles. She is also bilingual, so Spanish-speaking patients are welcome. Her Spanish is conversational; she is not a certified medical interpreter, and she works with a qualified interpreter for consent and complex counseling.

Education

• Post-master’s Certificate - Psychiatric Mental Health, Frontier Nursing University
• Post-master’s Certificate - Family Nurse Practitioner, Bradley University
• Master of Science Degree in Nursing (Nurse-Midwifery), Frontier Nursing University
• Bachelor of Science Degree in Nursing, St. Francis Medical Center College of Nursing
• Bachelor of Arts Degree in History, University of Dallas