She transformed nursing by making it an area of clinical practice and research and recasting nurses as colleagues of doctors, not assistants.
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Loretta Ford, who co-founded the first academic program for nurse practitioners in 1965, then spent decades transforming the field of nursing into an area of serious clinical practice, education and research, died on Jan. 22 at her home in Wildwood, Fla. She was 104.
Her daughter, Valerie Monrad, confirmed the death.
Today there are more than 350,000 nurse practitioners in America; it is one of the fastest growing fields, and last year U.S. News and World Report ranked it the top job in the country, a reflection of salary potential, job satisfaction and career opportunities.
That success is in large part the result of a single person, Dr. Ford, who in 1965 co-founded the first graduate program for nurse practitioners, at the University of Colorado, and subsequently mapped the outlines of what the field entailed.
At the time, nurses were important figures in the medical field, providing not just administrative support but also vital services where and when doctors were unavailable. But the training and career framework for nurses was almost completely absent.
“In nurses’ training, the focus is too much on teaching and administration,” Dr. Ford said in a speech at Duke University in 1970. “We want to make the nurse into a clinician.”
She went further in 1972, when she was hired as the first dean of the school of nursing at the University of Rochester. There she implemented the “unification” model of nursing, in which education, practice and research are fully integrated.