2023 Health Care Champions Nurse: Heather Ulm

While noting her most important professional role always will be as a labor and delivery nurse, Mercy Hospital Springfield’s Heather Ulm says the trajectory of her health care career changed with the 2017 birth of her daughter.

She had an amniotic fluid embolism after her delivery, and it nearly led to her death.

“My daughter and I are both thriving thanks to the incredible response from my team,” she says. “When I came back to work after my recovery, it only took a few months for me to realize that my anxiety and (post-traumatic stress disorder) were not going to let me be at the bedside at that time. This led me to my current role, which is education.”

Ulm, who has worked 13 years at Mercy since earning her bachelor’s degree in nursing from College of the Ozarks in 2010, is a clinical nurse educator for the health care provider.

“My role is to train both new and experienced labor and delivery nurses so that they can provide quality, family-centered care to our pregnant and laboring patients,” she says, adding she also does orientation training for new nurses. “Without high-quality education and training, our nurses would not be able to respond appropriately to emergency situations.”

Ulm says her role is crucial to retain the new nurses as they build their confidence throughout the first couple years in the department.

“If they do not feel supported, or if they do not have the resources and training they need to safely care for their patients, then they won’t stay, and we will never be able to build experience within the department or hospital,” she says.

While she primarily is an educator, Ulm says at her core she’s still a labor nurse. She frequently is in the unit helping with lunch relief for other nurses or just lending a hand when the department is busy.

Ulm also has worked with Mercy’s leadership team to get a high-fidelity birthing manikin for her department and hospital. The addition allows staff to incorporate more realistic simulation in various departments, including labor and delivery, intensive care units and even at birthing centers at outlying hospitals.

Jennifer Murray, executive director of women’s and children’s services and behavioral health nursing at Mercy, is a longtime co-worker of Ulm. She says Ulm is passionate about finding the right solutions and bringing the latest maternity care advances to those providing women’s care.

“Heather is creative and innovative in her approach to education and has developed our maternal simulation program, which provides real-life critical situations for our care team to practice and learn through simulation,” Murray says. “I can confidently say women’s health care is better because of the work Heather does.”

Outside Mercy, Ulm is involved in several women’s health groups, including membership in the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses, for which she’s an instructor for its intermediate electronic fetal monitoring course. She’s also a patient family partner for Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Advocates Voices, a maternal health patient-advocacy coalition that helps those who have been through traumatic deliveries develop their stories and use them to advocate for other women.