
Loretta Ford, “mother” of the nurse’s specialist practitioner, dies at 104

Loretta Ford, who co -founded the first academic program for nurse practitioners in 1965, transformed the area of nursing into an area with serious clinical practice, education and research, died on January 22nd in her home in Wildwood, Florida. She was 104.
Her daughter Valerie Monrad confirmed death.
Today there are more than 350,000 nurses in America. It is one of the fastest growing areas, and last year US News and World Report classified it as a top job in the country, a reflection of the salary potential, job satisfaction and career opportunities.
This success is largely the result of a single person, Dr. Ford, who co -founded the first graduate program for nurse at the University of Colorado in 1965 and then assigned the outline of what the area brought with it.
At that time, nurses were important figures in the medical field and not only provided administrative support, but also important services where and when doctors were not available. But the training and career frame for nurses was almost completely absent.
“In the training of the nurses, the focus is too much on teaching and administration,” said Dr. Ford 1970 in a speech at Duke University. “We want to make the nurse a clinician.”
She continued in 1972 when she was the first dean of the School of Nursing at the Rochester University. There she used the “Association” model of nursing, in which education, practice and research are fully integrated.
“The job gives the ability to study research and to practice researchers from the nurse, do this work and at the same time to educate future workers”.
Dr. Ford’s work in the 1970s often stood in front of doctors who mocked the idea that nurses influence the medical field and possibly threatened their dominance.
“We actually got hate letters by post,” said Eileen Sullivan-Marx, who under Dr. Ford studied in Rochester and is now the school of the School of Nursing at New York University, in an interview.
Dr. However, Ford and others urged themselves to build licensed protocols at the state level, standardize curricula and adapt insurance programs so that nurse have a content and often independent role in the health system.
And she emphasized that nurses were not there to replace doctors, but to complement them-to do the frontline work in hospitals, but also to be in the community, focus on health and prevention at the basic level.
“It was obvious to me,” she told Healthy Magazine Women in 2022, “that we needed advanced skills and an extended knowledge base to make the decisions.” Because it happens in a hospital. Who do you make, make decisions at 3 a.m.? “
Loretta Cecelia Pentecost was born on December 28, 1920 and grew up in Passaic, in New Jersey, her father Joseph, and her mother Nellie (Williams) Pentecost, who supervised the house.
As a child, Loretta hoped to become a teacher, but the beginning of the global economic crisis hit her family’s finances hard and she had to work with 16 work. She became a nurse and acquired a diploma in Middlesex General General Hospital in New Jersey in 1941.
Her fiance was killed in the fight in 1942 and inspired her to join the US Army Air Forces in order to be a flight nurse. But her bad eyesight disqualified her from flying and at the end of the war she was based in a hospital in Denver.
In 1949 she received a bachelor’s degree in nursing in 1949 and there in 1951 a master in public health.
At the beginning of her career, she specialized in pediatric public health and at the same time taught in the nursing program of the University of Colorado. Until 1955 she was an assistant professor and received a doctorate in education from the school in 1961.
She married William J. Ford in 1947. He died in 2014. Her daughter is her only survivor.
Dr. Ford’s work led her to rural parts of Colorado, where doctors were only a few poor families, and the need for fundamental medical care was acute. She played many roles under the title “Nurse”-she was part of the public health officers, partial consultants and partly all-round clinic.
At the same time, the administration of Kennedy and Johnson brought a new feeling of urgency for the questions of the public health of rural areas and the support of innovations in all medical areas.
Dr. Ford worked with Henry Silver, a pediatrician in Colorado, and created a graduate program for nurses, even though it was initially in the form of further training without a degree. But the core of her vision was already there: the nurses should be sufficiently trained to make independent decisions, to have their own practices and to take part in health care as part of a team.
“The complete independence for every today’s health practitioner is a myth,” she said at Duke. “It could be bad practice.”
When she retired from Rochester in 1986, there were thousands of licensed nurses, and many doctors had accepted them as colleagues who did not support players.
Dr. Ford continued and lecture and in 2011 she was accepted into the US women’s hall of women.
“I get a lot of recognition for 140,000 nurses and I don’t earn it,” she said in her acceptance speech. “They are those who fought the good fight. They took the heat and they stood them and they made it beautiful. “