Growing up in New York, Ford wanted to be a teacher, but her family couldn’t afford to send her to school. After graduating high school at 16, she took a job at Middlesex General Hospital (now Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital) in New Brunswick, N.J., as a nurses’ aide. “I lived with a [nursing] student and read all her books, so when I went into nursing school — you had to be 18 — I was ready. And by that time, of course, I really enjoyed nursing, and that was it.” She joined the hospital’s training program, graduating in 1941, and worked for the Visiting Nurse Service in New Brunswick. In 1942 her fiancé was killed in World War II, so she joined the US Army Air Force, serving at base hospitals in Florida and Maine, serving for three years to the end of World War II.
That made her eligible for G.I. Bill educational benefits, and attended the University of Colorado, completing her B.S. in Nursing with a Public Health Nursing certificate (1949) and Master of Public Health Nursing Supervision (1951), and worked as a public health nurse for Boulder County and eventually became the director of nursing at the Boulder City-County Health department. She also went back to school on the side, earning her Doctorate in Education from the University of Colorado in 1961, while simultaneously working as an assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Nursing in Denver, where she earned full professorship in 1965. And that’s just the runup to what she really did: Ford co-developed the first nurse practitioner program. During her early work in Colorado, she spent a lot of time in rural parts of the state, where there was a shortage of doctors. Ford and other nurses filled in by creating temporary health clinics, confirming her theory that nurses could independently fill gaps in healthcare if offered specialized training. She was determined to develop the curriculum for that training, joining with pediatrician Henry Silver, M.D., to do just that at the University of Colorado.
The program was introduced in the journal Pediatrics in 1967 as “a new educational and training program in pediatrics for professional nurses which has been developed to provide increased health care for children in both rural and urban areas.” Though “the patients accepted it very early,” Ford said, doctors — and even many nurses — opposed the idea. But the ongoing and widespread shortage of doctors in the United States made the program a necessity. It worked: in 1971, Elliot Richardson, the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, made a formal recommendation for expanding the scope of nursing practice to be able to serve as primary care providers. Today, 27 U.S. states grant nurse practitioners full practice authority; in the remaining states, they are required to work under the supervision of a physician. The idea spread to other countries too, such as Australia, Canada, Israel, and the U.K. “Like many visionaries, she paid a price for moving the bar,” says Dr. Kim Curry, former editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, “but she persevered until the NP role became a national, then international, movement.” Today, there are more than 385,000 nurse practitioners in the United States alone.
In 1971, Ford was elected to the National Academy of Medicine — and recruited to be the founding Dean of the nursing school at the University of Rochester, where she developed the unification model of nursing, a holistic approach to nursing education designed to include education, research, and clinical practice in the training of nurses. The approach is now standard in nursing schools. She retired in 1985 and moved to Florida, but still taught as a visiting professor at St. Luke’s College of Nursing in Tokyo, the University of Washington, and other schools. In 1995, the University of Rochester created an endowed chair in her name.
“Lee Ford was a remarkable leader who transformed the face of health care through her fierce advocacy and bold vision,” says Lisa Kitko, dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Rochester. “As an architect of the Unification Model of Nursing, her impact on our school and nursing profession runs deep, and her commitment to excellence continues to guide us.” Ford was named a Living Legend by the American Academy of Nursing in 1999. Dr. Loretta “Lee” Pfingstel Ford, EdD, RN, PNP, NP-C, CRNP, FAAN, FAANP, died in Florida on January 22, at 104.