 So, my name is Lorraine Mogford and I'm one of the organizing members of this conference and I'm going to be introducing Dr. Cindy Farley. It's my honor to introduce you to her. This is our seventh year working together at VIDM. Cindy Farley studied midwifery at Emory University. She earned her BSN and PhD from the Ohio State University and her MSN from Emory University excuse me. She has worked clinically in a variety of birth settings including University Hospital in Cincinnati, Mount Eaton Care Center in Mountain Eden, Ohio. She is a professor at Georgetown University and in the nurse midwifery women's health nurse practitioner programs. She currently serves as a locum tennis midwife for Palmarine Hospital, a rural hospital in Millersburg, Ohio. Dr. Farley reviews selected legal cases involving midwifery regulatory issues and clinical care. She's co-editor of the clinical practice guidelines for midwifery and women's health, an American Journal of Nursing 2002 book of the year and a prenatal and postnatal care, a women's centered approach. She has been instrumental in organizing groups of midwifery and WHNP students to visit their federal legislators and advocate for positive change in important maternal health policies and legislation. She received the 2020 American College of Nurse Midwives Public Policy Award for this work. She was awarded a faculty residency in the fall of 2019 at Oxford University in England learning from British midwives and midwifery students and exploring their systems of care for childbearing families. She has contributed to global health efforts in Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti, and Liberia. Making midwives to improve health and well-being of all people is Dr. Farley's passion. She's on the board of directors of the new Cincinnati Birth Center and will offer women – oh, I did – and she will offer women birthing people and families in Cincinnati surrounding areas a safe and satisfying birth experience with competent and compassionate midwifery care. Cindy Farley will introduce our students as they come along. We have five student panelists, Kelly Grant from Oregon, Zoe Papas from Georgia, Kayla Tingstead from California, Flora Fraser from California, and Jennifer Piercy from Florida. They are members of the 35th cohort of Georgetown University's Hybrid Distance Education program in midwifery and women's health, and they are all completing their first course in labor birth, postpartum, and newborn care. Students are in program tracks ending with either the master's or doctoral degree, and there you can learn a little bit more about them there. So welcome, and I'm going to give Cindy the presenter status now, and there you go. Welcome, Cindy and students. Thank you, Lorraine. Certainly always a pleasure to be with you at our seventh year together, and I really appreciate your support as facilitator. My Georgetown students are going to share their experiences of peer support in a distance learning program. I want to point out the two Bulldog peer puppies there in the photo. Bulldog is the mascot of Georgetown, and there have been a succession of live Bulldogs named Jack living at Georgetown. I find this photo heartwarming, the same warm fuzzy feeling that can come from peer support. And Lorraine described my background pretty well, so I'm just going to move on here. Other than to mention, I don't think these books are a conflict of interest so much as a Georgetown requirement to post. These books are sold in 28 countries. I'm always so fascinated by that, so thank you. And I donate my royalties to midwifery causes, so. I do live in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a small village of about 4,000 people located in the Midwest area of the United States. I started my teaching career in the launch and early days of Frontier Nursing University back when distance learning was not cool. Teaching and learning remotely were novel at the time, but have grown in educational endeavors since and was fully accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, I would make a distinction between forced distance learning versus planned distance learning in the way that faculty and students connect and work with the differences. What we can say unequivocally is that distance learning works. The remote environment does present some challenges for developing peer support, but it is quite possible. I like to point out that relationships can and do form over the internet, from friendship to romance to even sex. So peer support is very possible and should be mindfully encouraged by faculty so that meaningful peer relationships can be formed among your students. Together we care for each other is a theme of this year's conference, and this is a perfect fit for our topic of peer support. A peer is someone who shares common experiences and social similarities. Peer support has a number of meanings, but most pertinent for us today are these. To hold up, to serve as a foundation for, to keep from losing courage, to keep going. A midwifery student peer can provide the deeply felt empathy, encouragement and assistance that comes from going through similar experiences in their midwifery education. Think about how peer relationships can develop and then see how these elements are reflected in our students' stories today. Peer support can be informally developed through connections made in and after class. In our modern world, many connections are made through the use of social media, such as what we're doing right now. Formal peer support programs can be structured by faculty. These are often voluntary. For example, our friends at Oxford Brooks University in Oxford, England, pair their second year students with their first year students to develop peer support. About seven years ago I met with a group of Georgetown students to develop our own formal system of peer support, and we call this SACSA siblings. This is derived from Georgetown's official cheer, Hoya SACSA. And that comes from the ancient Greek and Latin for what rocks. And if you ask me, I think midwives rock. We all rock. We invite students in their first term of our program to become a SACSA sibling. And I pair them with a volunteer mentor in their fourth term usually. And it's a process I like to think of as similar to match.com. I am a matchmaker for sure. We encourage a phone call at a mutually agreed upon time to start this relationship, and then what they make of it is up to them. I try to match by geographic location as our distance learning students come from all over the United States, which encompasses five different time zones. My rationale for this is that they will begin their careers with a local network of support and can continue their connections through involvement in professional midwifery organizations in the US, such as the American College of Nurse Midwives. This creates other avenues of peer support as students step out in their career. There's limited research on the influence of peer support in midwifery education, making this a great idea for future research students out there. Just putting it out there for you. The existing evidence regarding peer support among midwifery students suggests that benefits for peer mentors includes the opportunity to develop mentorship and leadership skills. And another feature that I find is it allows them to reflect on their own personal growth as they share their stories with their sex siblings. And for the peer mentee, enhanced confidence and practical advice help to optimize their educational experiences. And so for this panel discussion here are our objectives. Our students will describe their experiences of both giving and receiving formal and informal peer support in their US Distance Midwifery Education program. To our live audience, we're curious about your own stories of peer support. So feel free to share anything. And I want to proudly note on this slide our previous Georgetown student presentations. We have presented on advocacy, confidence for first birth, developing publications, food and culture, international student experiences, and COVID effects on the student experience. So I'm now going to hand over our talk to our midwife student panelists. And first up is Florey Frazier. Happy International Day to the midwife. Thank you, Dr. Farley. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. And thank you for all joining us today. I'm Florey Frazier, student midwife and student women's health nurse practitioner at Georgetown University. And just next week, I'll start my final semester of my program. And I'm very much so looking forward to the bright future ahead of midwifery. So just being here and being surrounded by so many midwives and midwifery students is truly inspiring. And I feel very honored to be here today. A little bit about me. I've grown up in and lived in beautiful San Diego County, California, my whole life. And I always planned to grow up here, go to school here, live here, work here. Because this is where my tribe is. And the Cambridge Dictionary definition of a tribe is a group of people, often related families who live together, share the same language, culture and history. And this is where I feel most at home, most connected and most loved. But however, with all that being said, there's also a Yiddish proverb that states, you make a plan and God laughs. And that has definitely been true to me and my story. My career journey up until this point has been completely nonlinear. My journey has taken me from job to job, state to state, and all around the globe. And while it hasn't gone according to my plan, I truly would not change a thing about it because I've learned and found that my tribe can exist outside of the community that raised me. So just as most things, when they're happening in the moment, it may be hard to understand and we might not appreciate it. But when we look back on our journeys, like I've looked back on my journey this far, I so appreciate the people that I've met and the places that I've been. And some of these people, like Susan, who is one of my preceptors here on this chat, I would consider one of the key players in my journey. I love the guidance, the love that they've given me, the friendship, the mentorship, has all helped shape me to be the woman that I am today. So mentorship has always been very important to me without even having the conscious thought of, oh, I need a mentor. I've always sought out the advice from others who've come before me, others that know more than I do or more successful than I am to learn and to grow from them. And I've always been interested in teaching others what I know as well. For me, this goes back to high school. I was a junior volunteer at a local hospital. I was super excited to get into the hospital, learn all that I could from the more seasoned volunteers, get my experience and be able to train new volunteers. And then in nursing school, my undergrad program, with the guidance of my nursing school dean and a few of my professors, I was able to found and create from the ground up a nurse mentorship program at Shenandoah University. And now in graduate school as a midwifery and women's health and practitioner student, I benefited as a mentee in the Hoya Sox program from my professors and my preceptors. And most importantly, I have benefited from the mentorship and companionship of my classmates. And I can safely say that without them, I would most certainly not be where I am today. I've been able to make connections with my classmates, even in this distance setting. And I've also been able to make connections with prospective students that have reached out to me via LinkedIn or Instagram and have asked me about my experience, should they apply, what's it like once you get accepted. And I just find that to be really, really cool. So mentorship and building a midwifery tribe that breaks boundaries and crosses borders is very important to me. And I have a couple of reasons why. So first is power and community. Power and community is the together in our theme together we care. Today we're celebrating a hundred years of progress in our profession and that is a huge accomplishment. There is so much power in our midwifery community. We've broken barriers, we've changed policies, we've improved health outcomes globally. And not one individual was able to make this level of progress on their own. But it is the result of us coming together, advocating together that we are able to make these changes. And I know that we'll continue to do so as we move forward in our careers as midwives. Then the next point is strength and shared experiences. And this is the we and together we care. I'm not sure if you've ever tried to explain what it feels like to care for a pregnant or laboring patient or the way that you too might hold your breath when the fetus is restituting or when you have to support a birthing person that is either had passed undesirable experience or current undesirable experience. And while it's not impossible to explain what that feels like to a non-birth worker, a birth worker knows and understands because they too have experienced those same or similar feelings. They've been there, they've done that, and they can uplift you, encourage you, teach you and motivate you just as someone did for them when they experienced it for the first time. And finally, relationship building is the care and together we care. Relationship building is more important now than it ever was before. Relationship building is what brings the heart of midwifery to everything that we do. And especially after two years of being physically and sometimes emotionally separated from community. We are now working very hard to build back those relationships and create new relationships and friendships. As an online student, I at Georgetown, I never had the opportunity to meet my classmates face to face until just two weeks ago. And the relationships and friendships that we created in the online setting were only strengthened and made unbreakable by seeing each other in person. And these relationships, I know, will carry on throughout our entire careers. All of my classmates are always going to have a midwifery friend in San Diego through me. And I'll always know I have a friend in Florida through Jen or a midwife friend in Oregon through Kelly. And I just think that's amazing. I'll definitely lean on my my classmates and cohort members as I know they'll lean on me as well. So to just wrap up, I want to leave you with a final thought from Toy Story. I'm not going to sing it, but you have a friend that you've got a friend in me. You've got troubles. I've got them too. There isn't anything I wouldn't do for you. We stick together and we see it through because you've got a friend in me. So happy International Day of the Midwife and we'll turn it over to my next classmate. Hi there, let me get this going. OK, Florey did a great job. It's hard to follow. But my name is Kelly Grant. I was born and raised just outside of Portland, Oregon in a small town called Newburgh. I've lived here my entire life and probably would continue to live here. My entire life only now I'm leaving to move closer to the hospital for my job upon graduation in August. My background as a nurse is primarily an abdominal organ transplant, urology and major plastic surgery, specifically gender confirmation surgeries. As a nurse, many of us know we lean on peer support constantly from things like asking our shiftmates to take a look at something or even talking to them when we've had a rough day on the unit. And they're sure to be the people to understand. In distance learning, it's no secret that peer support is a challenge. We have women in this room from as far as students go from as far west as Oregon and California to as far east as Florida and Georgia. How do we bring these women close together and provide support for one another? Well, that's the big question. And Georgetown has done a great job in providing an answer. Unless you know somebody starting school at the same time as you, beginning a master's program can feel extremely lonely and isolating. Late night studying, hours reading, stress about the next exam. The isolation starts when you realize no one at home knows what you're going through and can't really relate. During my first term in the program, an email slipped into my inbox about the SACS's sibling program. It's a peer support program that Dr. Farley mentioned, organized by Georgetown to connect new students with students nearing the end of their program. I was matched with my sibling, Ashley, who offered advice and comfort as the first few terms were beating me down. Specifically the first term. It was so refreshing as a person knew the program to have somebody there who had been through the classes and could relate to my questions, concerns, and occasionally frustrations. Talking to Ashley felt like a safe place to ask questions and was a great resource when I wasn't quite sure who my other resources were. She always pointed me in the right direction. I decided that I was going to be a sibling when it was my turn to help a new student. Well, this year in late January, I was matched with my sibling, Carly, this time in the mentorship position. I've asked Carly if it's okay if I can share a little bit about our interactions and a little bit about her. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to get a picture of her on the slide. But Carly is a labor and delivery nurse from Washington who just completed her first semester at Georgetown. She has a young daughter and continues to work while in school. During her stressful time in the pathophysiology, which I'm sure even if you've been outside of school for a little while, you can relate to patho being a little bit challenging, maybe a little frustrating at times, certainly scary at times. She had questions about body systems and what to look forward to next semester. And so Carly reached out. No matter the day or the time, I made myself available to Carly for questions and support and have continued to make myself available. In coincidence, she just texted me this morning asking me a question. Questions like, what does next term look like? How was your professor for pharmacology? Would you recommend them? Should I buy the recommended textbooks or just the required textbooks? What did you really use? Support was often surrounding the stress of being in grad school for the first time and frankly, the ingrained fear of not passing patho. Our first call lasted about an hour and Carly and I have had many calls and messages since. I'll admit my favorite calls are always the pep talks. I remember being in the first few semesters and wondering, why is this so hard? Am I going to pass patho? How did I do so well in undergrad? And now I'm having so much trouble. Little did I know, those are the same questions that many new students have. The first terms and especially the first few terms are so anxiety provoking with all the new challenges that you face as a new student nurse midwife and a new master student. Through the SACSA sibling peer mentorship program, I have met amazing women who are looking for support, community and understanding. I have gained insight into the lives of my peers, gained mentorship skills and tips for how to study in things like complex guide and things that are more challenging for some people and were certainly challenging for me. The emotional and personal satisfaction I feel from being a SACSA sibling has been the most exciting takeaway for me. With every exam, I text Carly and check in, see how she's holding up and celebrate her victories with her. When things go sideways, we game plan and strategize for the next time. Watching growth and celebrating every win has been so fulfilling. To me, the beauty of the SACSA sibling program is that regardless of the distance between us, we can be there to support each other, hype each other up and celebrate together at vulnerable points in the program. There's a saying I'm sure many of us have heard that nurses eat their young, but I'm here to tell you that nursing master's students don't. The one-on-one peer support is our opportunity to break down the distance, build confidence, friendships and realize that we're better together. Thank you for listening to me and happy International Day of the Midlife. Thank you, Kelly. Happy International Day of the Midwife, everyone. I am extremely honored to be present with you all today, and I thank you for celebrating an invaluable profession, a profession that I am excited to continue learning about and becoming a part of. My name is Jennifer, and I am currently in Navar Beach, Florida with my husband, Joe, and seven-year-old daughter, Lottie. We are a military family. We have lived everywhere, all over the United States and in Okinawa, Japan, over the course of the last 21 years. And because of our experiences, I have had a lot of practice finding our support system within wherever the military sends us. So, thinking back two years ago, I remember my very first semester as a graduate student and all of the adjustments I needed to make. Firstly, learning to navigate an online platform and the flipped classroom with the volume of course work and the large amount of material to consume weekly was definitely challenging. But also, the 10-plus-year gap between my last experiences as a student felt overwhelming. I could say, in a way, I can compare this to a military move in where you know no one and immediately find that value in establishing a network of support. With my rusty study skills, I reached out and posted on the wall asking if anyone would like to start a study group. And I quickly realized that I was not the only one who felt anxious and a bit overwhelmed. And now, we have all become fast friends and the best support system. Through the last two years, our study group has grown and evolved into so much more than helping ourselves meet our objectives. They are often the first people I reach out to when I need advice, when I need to vent or commiserate in this great work that consumes us, and of course, to celebrate all of our victories. Honestly, they have all become family as we've shared our lived experiences, not just with school, but beyond our studies. I attribute part of my access and happiness within this program to those connections I have been privileged to make. A year into my graduate school experience, I had an opportunity to apply and become an ambassador and saxa sibling for the university presented itself. Because of the value I found in the connections I've made with my peers, I thought this was a wonderful, formal avenue and where I can pay it forward. As an ambassador and saxa sibling, I am available for prospective students and new students just beginning their journey on becoming a midwife or a women's health nurse practitioner. I help ease any anxiety by answering questions regarding my personal experiences regarding my personal experiences and pointing them in the right direction. Oftentimes being a mom and a military spouse who also worked while in school, many new students wondered how I was able to balance everything. My answers were always simple. Firstly, a supportive family, and then next important thing was my cohort. I always give this one piece of advice. Find your people. The people that are alongside you within this program. The ones next to you on the Zoom screen when you're in class. No one else will understand how you are feeling better than them. Your support in the beginning of my journey to becoming a midwife will be the foundation to how I want to practice midwifery. As a student and we as student midwives and someday soon practicing midwives, we'll need our people, our cohort of wonderful humans who share many things with us in common. I know I will need advice and guidance as I navigate my future midwifery practice and I truly believe in making connections because honestly, we are so much stronger together. My experience as a student midwife has been enriched by these relationships I've gained with peer support. And moving forward, I really hope to continue to connect with students that are following in our footsteps by providing them with the encouragement and moral support we all have in morals. Part we all have a common goal. And when we collectively care and support one another, our future patients will think us. Thank you so much for your attention and happy international day of the midwife. Hello, everyone. My name is Tayla Tingstad and I am a student midwife, WHNP, and I am also pursuing my doctor of nursing practice degree. I am very honored to be here today. I currently live in San Diego, California, Lake Fleuray. And this picture I have here is actually me in front of the runoculas which are in bloom in San Diego right now and they are very beautiful. So my background as a nurse was in the postpartum setting, which also happens to be what my doctoral project is on. In particular, I am focusing on providers' beliefs and practices regarding postpartum care. And I see that Dr. Walker is here today. She has been my doctoral project mentor and I thank her for all of her support. So I am a Saxa sibling mentor and I have found it very rewarding. Saxa siblings are all about peer support. As a mentor, my role is to provide support to my mentee, but support can go both ways. It's always nice to have someone that truly understands what you're going through. You know, our family and friends are very supportive, but they aren't fully capable of appreciating all of the struggles that we go through. And so my mentee and I have been able to support each other also on a personal level. We found out that we both had struggled with infertility, which for a midwife student surrounded by pregnancy and birth can be very challenging. And so to be able to connect on that level as well has created a friendship between us. And luckily, I am now a mother of a beautiful one and a half year old little girl who keeps me very busy and she is napping right now. So hopefully she will continue to do that through this presentation. And being a mentor also helps me to connect and being a mentor also illuminates how much you have personally grown. It is rewarding to look back and see someone in your position from a year or two ago and to realize how much you have grown professionally and personally. I remember when I first started this program and hearing other students speak who were much further along than I was and I was just in awe and I had on admiration for them some were graduating soon and only had a few more births to attend and I didn't even know how a speculum worked. But now I am in my final semesters and I have learned and grown so much. And in just a few weeks I will get to start catching my first babies, which is very exciting. And I still just can't believe the journey that I've been on to get to this place in my life. And I am very aware that I still have a long way to go. But it's also satisfying to then be able to help prepare your mentee for what is to come in the program, whether it be challenging courses, issues with securing clinical placement, or just how best to find that school work-life balance. It is so easy to forget in this chaos that it is necessary to take time for ourselves and focus on our own mental well-being. So I like to give my mentee tips and tricks that I've worked for me in the past, hoping that she may be able to use them as well. It's also important to remember that these peers, our mentees or our mentors, will soon be our future colleagues. So to be able to build these professional and friendly relationships is great because you never know when you might need to call someone for advice on a case or just to figure out what the most recent guidelines of care are. And it's always valuable to have professional connections and developing these while you're in school with your mentee can be mutually beneficial. So thank you all very much and happy International Day of the Midwife. I will now turn it over to the next presenter. Hi, good afternoon, good whatever time it is, wherever you all are coming from. I am absolutely delighted to have this opportunity to share on this topic of peer support in midwifery and in midwifery education. My name is Zoe Pappas and I'm from Atlanta, Georgia. I am a WHMP student and a nurse-midwife student at Georgetown University like my peers. And I am finally entering my last semester, which has me absolutely ecstatic. For the past seven years, I have been a pediatric hematology oncology nurse at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. I am the oldest of five siblings and 21 cousins. So from a very young age, I knew two things about myself, that I loved being an older sibling with the unique spirit and energy it can bring and I very much wanted to serve people somehow, somewhere in the birthing process. I've come to find and truly believe that the best way for me to be both is by being a midwife, hopefully once I graduate. In my final semester of midwifery in nursing school, however, many life events brought me to taking the job at Children's with the pediatric hemat population. And I felt as though I'd set aside my path of becoming a midwife. But to re-quote the Yiddish proverb that Fleur earlier cited, you make a plan and God laughs. And sometimes he laughs really good, but that's neither here nor there. As I reflect back on my previous semester and ponder how I made it through midwifery school this far, the answer is easy. I made it this far because of the support of my peers, not only in formal ways, in no sort of required way, but just from their own kind spirits of not leaving anybody behind. And I think I can best illustrate this with a couple of stories. When I came across the Georgetown midwifery program three years ago, I was delighted that they did not require labor and delivery nursing. As I said earlier, I needed to take a job within pediatric chemoc, and I was very worried that that had derailed my dream of becoming a midwife. I felt like this was finally an opportunity to get back to my dream and to get back on track, and I was really, really excited. However, after making it through patho and pharmacology and all the other things, I found myself really, really anxious for beginning clinical. On my first day of class and my first clinical semester, I was honestly really terrified and was seriously concerned I'd made an error in judgment. I felt like an imposter amongst people with years of bedside nursing on L&D and postpartum units. I shared this concern with my class mainly because I was afraid they would think it when I introduced myself as a PT mock nurse. After sharing, a couple students reached out to me and said that they were also from different nursing backgrounds. They shared with me their different nursing backgrounds and how they felt that it was helpful in their path to becoming a midwife. This was a tremendous comfort to me. Another peer reached out and said after hearing what I said that she had sat down and written out a list of things that she was glad she knew from being an L&D nurse over the past years. She thought these were the things that would help her most in her future of pursuing being a midwife. The amount of times I have looked over this 12-page document, which is a tremendous amount of time to share with another student in the very busy academic rigor of midwifery school, is absolutely unreal. It truly was an amazing gift from a peer and I've consulted it numerous times out of comfort, out of lack of knowledge, out of just reminding myself what it is I need to know going forward. Two semesters later, I was feeling more confident. I was loving when I was learning. I could actually work a speculum. I knew what people were talking about with cervical exams. I could even do them. I could place an IUD in a reasonable amount of time and these were all tremendous accomplishments for me. And then out of nowhere, I found myself falling seriously ill. I was hospitalized in Atlanta for a week, out of class for two weeks, and out of clinical for four weeks. And I was completely sure that I would not be able to stay in that semester. And I was even more sure that this was going to once again derail my dream of becoming a midwife. After noticing I was in class, which in this midwifery school, no one really misses class, a student got my number from another. She reached out asking where I was. When I explained her what had happened, she immediately asked what she could do to help. At that time, I really had no idea but she didn't hesitate. She and some other students jumped immediately into action. My peers sent me class notes and study guides and practice questions that they had made up. They shared their hard work with me without a second thought. They shared their thoughts, their prayers, their words of encouragement. They checked in. I even got a call from a DoorDash employee saying that someone from Nevada had sent me a bunch of soup, which is like, I think, 11 states away from Georgia. And with their amazing support and generosity, I made it through the semester and I felt really confident about the knowledge that I had acquired throughout the semester. As peers in this program, even though we're miles apart, we look after each other and I've truly benefited from the amazing spirit of looking after one another. Everyone's success is success to our profession. As peers, we uniquely understand each other, not only as students, but as people seeking to become midwives. I'm new to the Texas sibling program. This past semester, I had heard of an opportunity to be a Texas sibling. I felt so excited to join in. As I said, I'm very new to being a sibling, but what I can say as my relationship with my sibling has unfolded that it is a beautiful way to pay it forward, as Jen said, and to look out for those coming in behind us because we're all in this together and we all plan to be midwives and supportive one is supportive midwifery. As student midwives, in care and support of each other, we remind each other of many important things. And I think the tone of peer-to-peer support that I've seen at Georgetown amongst my peers can be summarized in a very important Winnie the Pooh quote because I have to sneak in my Pete's background just a little bit. So the quote goes, you must always remember you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we're apart, we will always be there with you. Thank you for listening to me. Take care wherever you are and happy International Day of the Midwife. Thank you. Thank you, Zoe. That was powerful. And thank you to all the amazing students of cohort 35. You do rock. This is a photo of online sex sibling support and Mallory Ricketts is here in our audience. That's Jennifer Pierces sex sibling mentee. So you can see that sex sibling support can be fun as well as practical and useful. Thank you so much to our student panelists for sharing their stories. And thanks to our faithful facilitator Lorraine Mockford and also to our global audience for your kind attention. We would be happy to entertain any comments or questions that you have. Happy International Day of the Midwife. I think we have time for just a couple of questions or comments. I see Jane is saying great peer support. Lots of wonderful comments supporting the students as they told their stories. They're quite powerful stories as well. And I appreciate the sharing. It's very touches my heart. And I'm very happy that these relationships are being built. I'll just share a few questions for consideration for our audience. And to everyone what has been your experience of peer support as you were in school or since when you stepped out into your midwifery career. Peer support remains a powerful and important influence as we go through our careers which have such rewarding moments. Very nice to share those but also support when you need a boost. Lots of great thanks in the comments Cindy and thanks to you and to all the students and Jennifer Kaiser says you're the mentor of mentors. And I agree. Well that is so kind. Thank you everyone. Yes. Heather Bradford says that there's a lack of formal mentoring programs in the U.S. and we could learn from models in New Zealand which are where they're well established. And Jane Houston points out that peer support is essential. We stand on the shoulders of our foremothers and fathers. Absolutely. And Jessica Olson is saying she still talks to her saxa sibling years later. So peers can become lifelong friends as well. Absolutely. I've been busy scribbling notes about how I can implement some of this with my online programs. All right. I'm gonna just say thank you to everyone for your kind attention and I think we're we're done. All right then. Thank you. I see Jennifer Kaiser still writing but we'll grab that later. But thank you very much. Thank you Cindy. Thank you to all the students. They were just wonderful. Your stories have touched my heart very deeply.