A Pioneer in Creating the Role of Nurse Practitioner

She was convinced that nurses could go well beyond their traditional role. Many doctors disagreed.

- JAMES R. HAGERTY

WHEN THERE IS NO DOCTOR around, a nurse should be able to step in, take charge and practice medicine. That was the conviction of Loretta Ford as a young nurse in rural Colorado in the 1950s.

She believed nurses could go far beyond hand-holding, wound-wrapping and temperature-taking. Nurses weren't trying to be physicians, she said in a 2016 speech, but wanted "to get away from being a handmaiden" to them. The problem was that physicians regarded themselves as the "lords of health," as she put it.

Ford, who died on Jan. 22 at the age of 104, charted a stealth approach. Rather than confronting physicians, she teamed up with one, pediatrician Henry K. Silver. They designed a curriculum for registered nurses to qualify for a new profession: nurse practitioner. The first students enrolled in 1965 at the University of Colorado, her alma mater.