Loretta Ford, who co-founded the first academic program for nurses in 1965, spent decades to transform the nursing field into an area of serious clinical practices, education and research, died on January 22 in his home in Wildwood, Fla. He was 104 years old.
His daughter, Valerie Monrad, confirmed death.
Today there are more than 350,000 nurses in America; It is one of the most rapid growth fields and last year the US news and the world ranked the best work in the country, a reflection of wage potential, professional satisfaction and career opportunities.
This success is largely the result of a single person, Dr. Ford, who in 1965 co-founded the first degree program for nurses, at the University of Colorado, and subsequently mapped the contours of what The field entailed.
At the time, nurses were important in the medical field, providing not only administrative support, but also vital services in which and when the doctors were not available. But the training and career framework for nurses was almost completely absent.
“In the formation of nurses, the attention is too much on teaching and administration,” said dr. Ford in a speech to Duke University in 1970. “We want to transform the nurse into a doctor”.
He went beyond in 1972, when he was taken as the first dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Rochester. There he implemented the “unification” nursing model, in which education, practice and research are fully integrated.
“He gives the profession the ability to study herself with research and have researchers of nurses who carry out that job while educating the future workforce,” said Stephen A. Ferrara, president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, in an interview .
The work of Dr. Ford in the 70s has often faced the resistance by the doctors, who derived the idea of nurses who exercised influence in the medical field and, perhaps, threatening their domain.
“In reality we got hate letters by mail,” he said in an Eileen Sullivan-Marx interview, which he studied under Dr. Ford in Rochester and is now the emergence of the School of Nursing of New York University.
But Dr. Ford and others pushed, establishing license protocols at a state level, standardizing the curricula and adapting insurance programs to allow nurses’ professionals to play a substantial and often independent role within the health system.
And he underlined that the nurses were not there to replace the doctors but to complete them-for the front line work in hospitals, but also to be outside the community, focused on health and basic prevention.
“It was obvious to me,” he told Healthy Women Magazine in 2022, “that we needed advanced skills and a base of knowledge expanded to make decisions. Because it happens in the hospital. Who do they think make decisions at 3 in the morning?”
Loretta Cecelia Pfingstel was born on December 28, 1920, in the Bronx and raised in Passaic, in New Jersey, her father, Joseph, was a lithography and her mother, Nellie (Williams) Pfingstel, supervised the house.
As a child, Loretta hoped to become a teacher, but the beginning of the great depression hit his family hardly, and was forced to find work at 16. She became a nurse and in 1941 she gained a diploma in nursing by the Middlesex Hospital General in New Jersey.
Her boyfriend was killed in combat in 1942, inspiring her to join the air forces of the American army, with the intention of being a flight nurse. But his poor visible wondered her from the flight and at the end of the war he was based in the Denver hospital.
He obtained a degree in Nursing in 1949 from the University of Colorado and a public health Master in 1951.
At the beginning of his career he specialized in public public health, while he also taught the nursing program at the University of Colorado; In 1955 he was assistant professor and in 1961 he obtained a doctorate in education from the school.
He married William J. Ford in 1947. He died in 2014. Their daughter is his only survivor.
Dr. Ford’s work brought it to the rural parts of Colorado, where the doctors were few, the poor families were many and the need for basic preventive medical care was acute. He found himself reciting many roles under the title “Nurse”-partly official of public health, partly consultant, in part clinical in the round.
At the same time, the administrations of Kennedy and Johnson were bringing a new sense of urgency to rural public health issues and supporting innovation in all medical fields.
Working alongside Henry Silver, Colorado’s pediatrician, Dr. Ford created a degree program for nurses, although at the beginning he was in the form of continuous training, without a degree. But the kernel of his vision was already there: that nurses should be enough formed to make independent decisions, have their own practices and participate in health care as part of a team.
“Complete independence for any health professional today is a myth,” he told Duke. “It could be a decidedly scarce practice.”
When he retired from Rochester, in 1986, there were thousands of authorized nurses and many doctors had come to accept them as colleagues, not to support the players.
Dr. Ford continued to write and lessons, and in 2011 she was introduced in the United States’s Hall of Fame.
“I have a lot of credit for 140,000 nurses and I don’t deserve it,” he said in his acceptance speech. “They are the ones who fought the good battle. They took the heat and resisted it and did magnificently. “