Women’s Birth & Wellness Center is happy to announce the return of Dawn Erikson, FNP, to our staff.
In the 1990s, Erikson opted to birth her two children at Women’s Birth & Wellness Center. Her experience of the quality care that’s delivered at WBWC led Erikson, who is a family nurse practitioner, to accept a job as a primary care provider at WBWC in 2000. WBWC founder, Maureen Darcey, CNM, recruited and encouraged Erikson to join the WBWC team and expand the primary care aspect of the Center.
In 2004, Erikson left WBWC to take a position at Community Family Medicine in Pittsboro where she had the opportunity to work with families and across the age spectrum. However, after her children, Kyle, 22, and Anya, 20, left home for college, Erikson started thinking about her next step in health care.
In the meantime, she and her husband, Vic, wanted to spend some quality time together, so Vic also left his job so the couple could do some traveling in their 16-foot Airstream trailer. Erikson also used that time to work on her career as a fabric artist, taking art classes and marketing her art.
“It was a gift of two years of stepping away from our careers to re-establish our lives together,” she said.
When a job as a nurse practitioner opened up at WBWC this year, Erikson was ready to work again with women and newborns.
Erikson says a kidney infection that landed her in the hospital at age 5 sparked her interest in nursing. She encountered a “very mean nurse,” so Erikson said to herself: “I want to be a nurse, but I want to be nice.”
Erikson says she was attracted to nursing because it’s a caring profession. And she said her “natural caring tendencies,” were a good match with nursing.
Erikson, a native of a very small town, Greene, N.Y., earned her undergrad degree in nursing from SUNY Plattsburgh. After she and Vic moved to Chapel Hill in 1993, Erikson decided to seek a master’s degree as an FNP (Vic also attended UNC). Erikson said being an FNP gave her more autonomy as a health care professional because FNPs can diagnose and prescribe medicine.
“I can work much more independently,” she said.
Erikson said she is drawn to the Birth Center’s model of care, which is consistent with her core beliefs.
“WBWC is making a difference in the community because the practitioners provide quality care that allows staff to take their time with patients and not feel rushed,” she said.
At WBWC, a core of the practice is to allow staff to have time for people to be cared for.
Over the years, Erikson has used traditional practices, but she has always incorporated knowledge of herbal medicine, nutrition, and other modalities of healing in health promotion, treating patients’ illnesses, and keeping patients healthy.
Welcome back Dawn!