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

Loretta Ford, who founded the first academic program for nurses in 1965, then spent decades turning the hospital into an area of ​​serious clinical practice, education and research, died on January 22 at her home in Wildwood, Florida. It 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 have classified the country’s top jobs, salary reflection, job satisfaction and career opportunities.

This success is largely the result of a person, Dr. Ford, who in 1965 founded the first postgraduate program for nurses at the University of Colorado, and then mapped the outlines of the field.

At that time, nurses were important elements in the medical field, providing not only administrative support but also vital services where and when doctors were not available. But the framework for training and career for nurses was almost completely absence.

“In the training of nurses, the focus is very much in teaching and administration,” Dr. Ford said in a speech at Duke University in 1970. “We want to do the nurse at a clinical physician.”

He went more in 1972, when he was hired as the first dean of the Nursing School at the University of Rochester. There he applied the “integration” model of the nursing, in which education, practice and research are fully integrated.

“It gives the profession the opportunity to study the research and have a nurse researchers conducting this project while training the future workforce,” Stephen A. Ferrara, president of the US Association of Nurses, said in an interview.

The work of Dr. Ford in the 1970s often faced resistance from doctors, who fool the idea of ​​nurses who influence the medical field and, perhaps, threatening their sovereignty.

“We really got letters of hatred at the post office,” said Eileen Sullivan-Marx, who studied under Dr. Ford in Rochester and is now the Emerita of the School of Nursing at the University of New York.

However, Dr. Ford and others prompted, creating a state -level licensing protocols, standardizing curricula and adjusting insurance programs to allow nurses to play a substantial and often independent role in the healthcare system.

And he stressed that the nurses were not there to replace the doctors, but to supplement them-to do the first-line work in the hospitals, but also to find themselves in the community, focused on health and prevention at the base level.

“It was obvious to me,” he told Healthy Women Magazine in 2022, “that we needed advanced skills and an extensive basis of knowledge to make decisions. Because it happens in a hospital. Who do they think is making decisions at 3am?”

Loretta Cecelia Pfingstel was born on December 28, 1920 in Bronx and grew up in Passaic, her father, Joseph, was a lithograph and her mother, Nellie (Williams) Pfingstel, oversees the home.

As a child, Loretta hoped to become a teacher, but the appearance of the Great Depression hit her family’s finances and was forced to find a job at 16. She became a nurse and in 1941 she won a nursing diploma from Middlesex General General Hospital in Niou.

Her fiancé was killed in a battle in 1942, inspiring her to join the US air forces, which intends to be a flight nurse. But her bad vision ruled her to fly, and by the end of the war she relied on a hospital in Denver.

He received a degree in nursing in 1949 from the University of Colorado and Master’s in public health there in 1951.

At the beginning of her career she specialized in Pediatric Public Health, while teaching the Nursing Program at the University of Colorado. Until 1955 he was an assistant professor and in 1961 he won a doctorate in school education.

He married William J. Ford in 1947. She died in 2014. Their daughter is her only survivor.

Dr. Ford’s work took her to farm parts of Colorado, where the doctors were few, the poor families were many and the need for basic preventive medical care was acute. She found herself playing many roles under the title “nurse”-she was part of public health, part of the clinician.

At the same time, the administrations of Kennedy and Johnson brought a new sense of urgent need for agricultural public health and in supporting innovation in all medical areas.

Workers along with Henry Silver, a pediatrician in Colorado, Dr. Ford created a postgraduate program for nurses, although at first in the form of continuing education without a degree. But the core of her vision was already there: that nurses must be sufficiently trained to make independent decisions, have their own practices and participate in health care as part of a group.

“Full independence for any health professional today is a myth,” he told the Duke. “It could be completely bad practice.”

By the time he left Rochester in 1986, there were thousands of licensed nurses and many doctors had come to accept them as colleagues and not support players.

Dr. Ford continued to write and be a lecture, and in 2011 he was introduced into the US Women’s Rumor Room.

“I have a lot of faith for 140,000 nurses and I don’t deserve it,” he said in the speech of acceptance. “They are the ones who fought the good fight. They got the heat, and they stood it, and they have done beautifully.”