The Institute of Medicine will present the Gustav O. Lienhard Award for the advancement of personal health services to Ruth Watson Lubic, president and co-chief executive officer of the District of Columbia Developing Families Center. Lubic is being honored for her 40 years of pioneering work in the development of humane, innovative, and high-quality services for childbearing and childrearing families. The award, which includes a medal and a $25,000 prize, will be presented at the Institute's annual meeting on Oct. 15.

A visionary, Lubic was strengthened by her conviction that childbirth -- as not only a physical but also a social, emotional, and spiritual event -- has the potential to strengthen family structure in all social strata. Lubic devoted substantial efforts to facilitating the establishment of over 200 freestanding birth centers in and beyond the United States. Her efforts as a practitioner, advocate, administrator, educator, and public leader saw childbearing families empowered, practitioners and administrators sensitized, and a groundswell of change in the childbirth environment.

A Pennsylvanian transplanted to New York, where she resides with her husband, Lubic was general director for 25 years at New York's Maternity Center Association, an organization that since 1917 has focused on improving the lot of mothers and babies. In 1975, the association opened the nation's first freestanding birth center in Manhattan's affluent East Side and a second in an inner-city section of the southwest Bronx. Both gave families a choice of environments for childbirth and demonstrated the midwifery model of personalized care as an alternative to increasing technologic intervention in normal labor and birth.

A key element in these efforts, the National Association of Childbearing Centers, was co-founded by Lubic in 1983. As its first president, she helped to guide its mission of encouraging development of well-managed, accredited birth centers nationwide.

After receiving a MacArthur Fellowship in 1993, Lubic undertook a new vision, the establishment of the District of Columbia Developing Families Center. Following nearly seven years of effort, the center opened its doors in 2000. Situated in an area with an infant mortality rate more than three times the national average, the center is a collaboration with two established nonprofit organizations and adds daycare, outreach, counseling, and case management to the health care, childbirth, and pediatric services already offered by the D.C. Birth Center.

Lubic received her basic nursing education from the University of Pennsylvania, bachelor's and master's degrees in nursing from Teacher's College at Columbia University, and a certificate in nurse-midwifery from the State University of New York Health Sciences Center in Brooklyn. She also earned a doctorate from Columbia University in applied anthropology.

The Gustav O. Lienhard Award is funded by an endowment from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Lienhard was chair of the foundation's board of trustees from the organization's establishment in 1971 to his retirement in 1986. Lienhard, who died in 1987, had built his career with Johnson & Johnson Co., beginning as an accountant and retiring 39 years later as president. The annual award recognizes outstanding national achievement in improving personal health care services in the United States. Nominees are eligible for consideration without regard to education or profession. The award recipient is selected by a committee of experts convened by the Institute of Medicine. This year's committee was chaired by Gordon H. DeFriese, director and professor of social medicine, epidemiology, and health policy administration at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Additional information about Ruth Watson Lubic and the Lienhard Award can be found at <www.iom.edu/lienhard>. The Institute of Medicine is a private, nonprofit organization that provides health policy advice under a congressional charter granted to the National Academy of Sciences.