West Wing Clinic

Julie McCarron,
MS, DNP, CNM, APRN, IBCLC

Julie McCarron started her nursing career with mothers and babies over 30 years ago, working in many different areas including a NICU step-down unit, mother-baby and labor and delivery nursing, and public health nursing as well as lactation consulting. She has a Master’s degree in Community Health Nursing, post-master’s certificate in Nurse Midwifery and Family Nursing and a Doctor of Nursing Practice.

She has lived and worked in Homer since 1999 as a public health nurse for a few years and in the role of well baby and well young child provider as well as a midwifery and women’s wellness practice for about 20 years at HMC and SPH. She has also worked at Kachemak Bay Family Planning one day a week for the past 17 years. She is certified by ARDMS with her Midwife Sonography Certificate

Julie loves her job seeing the babies she knew when they were in utero grow and develop into amazing young children and working with women of all ages promoting their health and wellness.

In addition to her five children, Julie and her husband Jim have two grandchildren and a goofy dog.

She enjoys hiking, camping, & skiing with her family.

Dana Whittaker, 
MSN, CNM, APRN

Dana has traveled a long and winding road in midwifery. She was born and raised in San Francisco and received her BA in Communications and Sociology from Chico State University in 1983. After graduation, she joined the Peace Corps and spent over two amazing years in Zaire, Africa working as a teacher, and spending three months working with a British Midwife. She moved to Homer in 1986 and began her formal education in midwifery by attending the Seattle Midwifery School, graduating in 1993. She then opened her own practice in Homer, Ruby Slippers Midwifery (because there’s no place like home), providing midwifery and home birth care to the community before taking time off to raise her own 3 children, all born at her home off Ohlson Mountain Road. She was part of the pilot program for nursing at Kenai Peninsula College through Weber State University, graduated in 2005, and spent the next 12 years working as an RN at South Peninsula Hospital. She (again!) returned to school to pursue her Masters in Midwifery from Frontier Nursing University in 2016 and joined the West Wing in 2017. During this long and winding journey, she has cared for women and attended births in homes, birth centers, and hospitals in Alaska, Washington, St Lucia, The Gambia, and Senegal. She was excited to introduce and bring Home Birth services to the West Wing in 2020.

Dana is married and has three adult children, 2 dogs, and a variety of chickens. She offers both Midwifery and well-women care integrating her own interests in holistic health and mindfulness.  She also provides Medicated Assisted Treatment to pregnant women with opioid dependence. She views birth as a normal, physiological process, and enjoys sharing the evidence that supports natural birth while supporting women’s choice.

Her other interests and loves include travel, hiking, camping, skiing, yoga, and Vipassana meditation. She is a Spinning Babies Aware Practitioner and is currently enrolled in an herbal medicine course for women.

Kathryn Ault,
MSN, CNM, APRN

As a child of a midwife, Kathryn started her own journey toward midwifery at a young age. She grew up in Homer but left for Seattle to pursue her Bachelor’s degrees in French and Nursing, with the goal of someday working overseas. During her time in Seattle, she discovered a passion for women’s health and women’s studies and found that midwifery aligned well with that. Life took her back to Alaska and to Fairbanks where she worked as a registered nurse for a number of years before returning to graduate school to get her master’s degree in midwifery. She then worked for Indian Health Services in Fairbanks for about 4 years, catching babies in the community hospital and traveling to villages across Interior Alaska to provide care. Kathryn returned to her roots in Homer finally, after 12 years away, and is excited to be working with the other wonderful nurse-midwives at the West Wing. When she’s not at the hospital catching babies or talking about contraception in the clinic she can be found out on the bay boating or hiking with her family.