A new doctor in the Lewis-Clark Valley is helping to increase maternity care options for expecting parents.
Dr. Caroline Rolofson is TriState Health’s newest OB-GYN provider. She’s already giving on-call coverage for midwife deliveries at St. Joseph Regional Medical Center in Lewiston, alongside Dr. Lindsay Kern.
"We're doing kind of two weeks on, two weeks off,” Rolofson said. “We still get to be home and sleep in our own bed, and we're just there if one of the midwives needs us to come in.”
Though both Kern and Rolofson are employed by TriState, hospital deliveries in the Valley happen at St. Joe’s because TriState has no birth center.
Rolofson, who previously worked at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Boise, will start scheduling with patients at TriState after her Washington medical license is approved. Rolofson said she expects that to be approved in late August.
“I’m really excited to be here, to be able to help out the women in the LC Valley,” she said.
Even though Rolofson is not yet scheduled at TriState, her presence has already allowed two nurse-midwives to return to labor and delivery care at St. Joe’s after a roughly monthlong pause caused by a lack of on-call doctors.
The hospital requires midwives to have 24/7 doctor support in case of pregnancy complications that require a higher level of care.
Rolofson, who does complex gynecological surgery and high-risk obstetrics care, said her training leaves her well-equipped to deal with pregnancy complications, should they arise.
During her residency in North Carolina, she said, she treated many patients with high-risk pregnancies due to health issues related to low socioeconomic status and high crime rates.
“ I would say, almost everyone got preeclampsia,” she said. “It's prepared me to be able to handle really complex, stressful situations.”
Cesarean sections, which account for many of the complicated births in which Rolofson or Kern might be called in to assist a midwife, accounted for about 14% of deliveries at St. Joe’s in 2025, according to St. Joe’s.
That’s lower than the national rate cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of about 32%. The hospital also had a primary, or first C-section rate, of just under 5% in 2025, compared to the national average of about 23%.
Rolofson, who moved to the area because of her husband’s military career, said she expects to stay in the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley for at least the next three years. During that time, she said, she hopes to help build up the OB-GYN services.
“ I'm here to help keep this community stocked with great resources, and then hopefully in the next few years while I'm here, we're able to hire more doctors,” she said. “It's hard to be appealing to another doctor to say, ‘Hey, come join us. We have one other doctor here.’ But, ‘Oh, hey, come join us, we have three other doctors here,’ sounds a lot more appealing.”
Read the audio transcript here.
