World War II Veteran Co-Founds Nurse Practitioner Program

View Online World War II Veteran Co-Founds Nurse Practitioner Program Feb. 3, 2025 | By David Vergun A nationwide shortage of physicians in rural areas spurred a World War II nurse to work with a pediatrician and create the nurse practitioner program in 1965.  Loretta Ford, a native of the Bronx, New York City, earned her nursing diploma in 1941 and was working at Middlesex General Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, when her fiancé was killed during World War II. His death inspired Ford to serve as a nurse in the Army Air Forces, which later became the Air Force in 1947 after it split from the Army. During the war, she served at military base hospitals in Maine and Florida. Following the war, Ford used her G.I. Bill to attend the University of Colorado, where she earned a bachelor's degree in nursing in 1949.  Throughout the 1950s, Ford was a public health nurse for Boulder County, Colorado. It was a rural area with a lack of medical care availability, so she and other nurses set up temporary health clinics. Those experiences influenced her thinking that nurses could fill in for medical doctors if given some extra training. In 1965, Ford worked with pediatrician Henry Silver to create the first nurse practitioner program in the United States at the University of Colorado. She earned a doctorate in education from the same university in 1961. Ford, born Loretta Pfingstel Dec. 28, 1920, married William Ford in 1947. They had a daughter, Valerie Monrad, who now lives in Inverness, Florida. At age 100, Ford received the Surgeon General's Medallion — the highest civilian honor given by the Public Health Service. She was also inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame at age 91. Ford died Jan. 22, 2025, at her home in Wildwood, Florida, at age 104.  In 1971, Elliot Richardson, the secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, made a formal recommendation for expanding the scope of nursing practice so that nurses could serve as primary care providers. HEW later became known as the Department of Health and Human Services. That recommendation has been enacted in most states, where nurse practitioners, acting as primary care providers, can perform many of the same tasks as medical doctors, including performing diagnostic procedures and evaluations, ordering lab work or blood tests and prescribing medications and treatment plans.  Nurse practitioners have since risen to many high-level positions. Susan Orsega, a nurse practitioner and a rear admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, served as the acting U.S. surgeon general, Jan. 20, 2021 to March 24, 2021.

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