Catherine Clough, CNM

About

Catherine (Katie) Clough came to reproductive medicine through the waiting room. She went into the field after her own experience with infertility, and she now works on the other side of the exam table at Shady Grove Fertility’s Rockville office as a certified nurse-midwife — the person who performs many of the procedures a cycle is actually built out of, and who spends more minutes with a patient during monitoring than most physicians do.

Her credential is nursing, not medicine. Clough earned a Master of Science in Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002 through a joint program that trained her in both midwifery and women’s health nurse practice. She maintains board certification through the American Midwifery Certification Board and holds nursing licenses in Maryland and Virginia, and before joining SGF she worked for more than a decade across women’s health, caring for patients at every point of the reproductive spectrum — which in nurse-midwifery means everything from gynecologic care through pregnancy, labor and postpartum.

At Rockville she performs the procedures that a fertility cycle is monitored and planned with: ultrasound, intrauterine insemination, saline sonograms that map the uterine cavity, and mock embryo transfers done ahead of the real one so that the catheter and the path through the cervix are known before embryos are involved. Those are the tasks in her published scope, and they are substantial: monitoring scans decide when a trigger is given, and a trial transfer is one of the few steps in IVF that improves the next step at almost no cost. The stimulation protocol itself, the retrieval, and the medical decisions about a cycle belong to the practice’s reproductive endocrinologists, who see their own patients and can involve Clough where her procedures and follow-up fit.

Clinical Expertise

• Transvaginal ultrasound monitoring: follicle measurement and endometrial assessment during stimulated and frozen cycles, which sets the timing of a trigger
• Intrauterine insemination (IUI): performed as a scheduled office procedure with prepared semen
• Saline sonography: cavity evaluation for polyps, fibroids and adhesions before an embryo is transferred
• Mock (trial) embryo transfer: mapping cervical depth and the transfer path in advance so the actual transfer goes faster and with less trauma
• Women’s health care across the reproductive spectrum, from gynecologic assessment through pregnancy-related follow-up
• Patient teaching and continuity: injections, cycle calendars, symptom reporting and the questions that arrive between physician visits

Why Choose Catherine Clough, CNM

She does the procedures, not the paperwork. Ultrasound, IUI, sonogram and trial transfer are hands-on work, and Clough is the clinician most patients in a monitored cycle see most often.

Board certified and licensed in two states. Certification from the American Midwifery Certification Board with nursing licenses in both Maryland and Virginia — relevant for patients who live across the Potomac and commute to Rockville.

Nurse-midwifery training from Penn. A 2002 master’s degree from a joint Midwifery and Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner program, followed by more than ten years in women’s health before fertility work.

More than a decade in women’s health before fertility. Her prior roles were in women’s health generally, not in a specialty unrelated to this work.

She chose this field for a personal reason. Clough entered reproductive medicine after going through infertility herself, which is the background patients ask about and rarely get to check.

Professional Affiliations

Certified nurse-midwife, board certified by the American Midwifery Certification Board. Licensed by the boards of nursing in Maryland and Virginia. Master of Science in Nursing, University of Pennsylvania (2002), from the combined Midwifery and Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner program. Practices at Shady Grove Fertility’s Rockville, Maryland office within the physician team’s treatment plans.

Suitable For

• Patients in a monitored cycle who need serial ultrasounds — the scans are scheduled through her, and the results drive trigger timing
• IUI patients, for whom the insemination itself is the main procedure of the month
• Anyone scheduled for a saline sonogram or a trial transfer before an embryo transfer, particularly after a difficult prior transfer
• Patients who want to ask the practical questions — how the procedure feels, what happens next, when to call — with the clinician who performs it
• Note on scope: Clough is a certified nurse-midwife, not a physician. Diagnosis, ovarian stimulation protocols, egg retrieval and embryo transfer decisions are made by Shady Grove Fertility’s reproductive endocrinologists at this office