Brief History of Nurse Practitioner
The 1940s and ‘50s were moments in the life of the United States’ healthcare history, where there was an insufficient workforce to take care of basic community needs. Except for Loretta Ford and her other colleagues who were public health nurses, went around with things such as baby scales, setting up temporary clinics in schools, churches, and anywhere else they could. As she gained experience, in the 1960s, a period of political and social upheaval, Loretta Ford saw an opportunity in that chaos. She understood that more nurses should have specialized training so they could make fundamental healthcare decisions independently about the health status of patients.
Ms. Ford collaborated with Dr. Henry Silver, a pediatrician, to initiate the country’s first pediatric nurse practitioner program in 1965 at the schools of medicine and Nursing, the University of Colorado. Their objective was to expand the roles of public health nurses with an emphasis on health promotion and prevention. This development did not go down without criticisms, which came from some of Ford’s colleagues who thought she was working so closely with a physician in this program, fearing that the model would become more about nurses being supervised by doctors rather than serving as colleagues and partners. The next concern was whether state laws would permit what they were teaching: if nurses could use devices like the stethoscope and make decisions about the health status of children. Ford believed that nurse practitioners would be able to practice independently, and today many states are granted autonomy.
After the pediatric nurse practitioner program in Colorado, Ford became the founding dean of the University of Rochester School of Nursing in 1972. And by the 1980s, the nurse practitioner programs had started spreading all over the country. The early nurse practitioner programs did not give a degree on graduation but a certificate. Boston College, established in 1967, offered the first master’s degree nurse practitioner program, and the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners (AANP), formed in 1985, became the first nurse practitioner organization for nurse practitioners of all specialties.