Meet Your Experts

Marnie Lea, RDH., ProDoula(CD)

Co-Owner of The Hospital Doulas

Meet your doula | The Hospital Doulas | Orlando, FL | A great birth experience

Marnie Lea, a strategic partner in several successful businesses over the course of her career, brings her vision, expertise, and experience to the launch of The Hospital Doulas as a certified doula, coach and instructor. Marnie’s dynamic, heart-centered approach forges the important strategic alliances necessary to create a safe and high quality doula care system within the hospital setting. As a mother of two children, she knows intimately the importance of fostering a safe, supportive and holistic approach to what is considered a most significant life experience: the birth of a child. Marnie’s goal is to help families create an individualized birth experience they’ll cherish forever!

Originally from Winnipeg, MB, Canada, Marnie’s passion for providing superior client satisfaction and care began after obtaining her Dental Hygiene degree from the University of Manitoba. Decades later, this remains a fundamental driver in her interest as an influential advocate for the families she services each day. Her philosophy is that birth should be a highlight and a joyous event in one’s life. The birth experience of her first born was a long labor, fraught with many challenges, but she credits her “doula’s” presence for creating the space for her to achieve the empowered birth experience she had dreamt of – one with minimal interventions, despite the utter chaos going on around her.

A resident of Central Florida for 14 years, Marnie has seen over and over again that modern parents want to approach their births feeling knowledgeable, capable, respected, and prepared. In order to truly be satisfied with their birth experience, she knows parents need access to evidence based information about the labor process and have all the options available presented to them. There’s no doubt that as a doula she can prepare her clients for birth very well.

With all the preparation in the world, it’s still difficult to bridge the gap of obstetricians on call schedules, nurse assignments and shift changes. Marnie set out to create an extraordinary solution for birthing families by harnessing her affinity for servicing women and families in the health and wellness field. Sharing in her partner’s vision for bringing doula care to the mainstream, as it is so commonly done in Canada, she was keenly aware of the existing challenges they faced. With no regulation of doulas, it’s simply hit or miss with the quality of information, education, and support doulas can provide.

Marnie sees attainable solutions and is dedicated to assembling the critical components that are essential to providing highly qualified doulas. Providing doula care in the hospital setting requires a very different set of skills and knowledge than in a home or birth center birth. She has created doula teams with a high standard for safety and excellence utilizing proven and scientifically based methods, with the ability to communicate effectively and respectfully with all hospital personnel. Through implementing this model of specialized doula care she’s thrilled to help women and their partners create the birth experience they want and will cherish forever.

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Qualifications

Co-Founder – The Hospital Doulas & Associates
Certified Birth Doula – ProDoula
GentleBirth Instructor
Co-Leader of Human Trafficking Survivor Backpack Program (United Abolitionists)
Innovative Entrepreneur
Personal Development Counselor
Holistic Chamber of Commerce Treasurer
Dental-Hygeniene Degree – Consultant for several dental offices

“Having a doula for both of my children’s births made a significant difference with me feeling advocated for and supported.”

–Marnie, Co-Owner The Hospital Doulas & Associates

Lisa Collins M.A., CD(DONA)

Co-Owner of The Hospital Doulas & Evidence Based Birth® Instructor

Lisa’s passion for women, babies and families has been a lifelong one. She has chosen to dedicate her skills and talents to supporting families in various capacities over the course of her career. She has especially loved working with parents, first as a marriage and family therapist and author of a powerful parenting book, and then as an image consultant, helping moms regain their body confidence after a difficult transition into motherhood. 12 years ago Lisa was honored to support birthing couples as a certified birth & postpartum doula through her successful solo business, Modern Mother Doula Care. Today, she is thrilled to innovate and further her mission of bringing dynamic doula care to the mainstream by co-founding The Hospital Doulas!

Exclusively supporting hospital births, it became crystal clear to her that the required doula techniques, knowledge and communication skills needed to properly support her clients in the hospital birth environment were so very different from the ones she had been taught to her in doula training – the ones needed and appreciated in home or birth center settings. She even goes so far to say that women birthing in the hospital need doula support the most! She and her doula teams specialize in understanding the area’s various hospital policies, being informed about the dozens of medical intervention possibilities and delivering the ultimate in comfort measures without judgment or bias.

Along the way, from Boston, to Upstate New York to landing in the Orlando area eight years ago Lisa considers her greatest joy to be the love she shares with her husband, (her high school sweetheart), and the very deliberate parenting style they utilized while raising their 3 amazing kids. Having suffered from a lack of information when having her first two babies, she sees how today’s expectant parents suffer from the opposite conundrum…a glut of information available 24/7! She sees her clients being torn between everyone’s different views and philosophies, and wishes they could feel safe, confident, and educated enough to actually enjoy this incredibly special time. With the myriad of approaches, classes and trainings, it’s impossible to do them all or to know which ones would give them the best chance of getting the birth they desire.

Lisa was fortunate enough to add a doula to her birth team for her third and final birth, who guided her through an incredibly personalized and gratifying hospital labor and delivery. Although her husband was wary of the necessity of having and paying another person to participate in their birth, he immediately saw, understood, and celebrated the value their doula brought to the experience. Feeling completely supported, comforted and protected allowed Lisa to experience birth in a whole new way. This empowering and profound experience would inevitably set the course for the next chapter of her life. She was inspired to immerse herself in the birth world, eventually deciding on becoming a doula herself! She became both a DONA certified birth doula and a ProDoula certified postpartum and infant care specialist.

She continued educating herself to the highest possible level and continues to do so today, most recently being chosen to serve as an esteemed Instructor for Evidence Based Birth®, an unbiased source of the most current research designed to inform, empower, and inspire expectant parents and birth-care practitioners locally and globally. Regardless of the challenges each couple faces during the unpredictable birth process, Lisa knows that armed with the information they need, her clients are more than capable enough to consult with their obstetrician and make their own great decisions, leaving them with no regrets and a high level of pride and satisfaction with themselves and their birth experiences.

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