Loretta Ford created the nurse practitioner. Every American nurse practicing today under independent practice authority is working in a role she and a pediatrician built at the University of Colorado in 1965, over the objections of both professions.
Before
She was born Loretta Cecelia Pfingstel in New York City on December 28, 1920 and grew up in New Jersey. She took her nursing diploma in 1941 from Middlesex General Hospital in New Brunswick, and after her fiancé was killed in the war she joined the Army Air Forces in 1942 as a first lieutenant. She wanted to be a flight nurse and was turned down over her eyesight, so she spent the war in base hospitals in Florida and Maine.
Afterwards she went to Colorado, took a bachelor's degree in 1949 and a master's in 1951, and became a public health nurse for Boulder County.
What she saw in the field
Rural Colorado in the 1950s had almost no physicians. A public health nurse driving between mountain towns was, in practice, the only clinician many families would see, and Ford found herself assessing sick children, deciding what was serious, and managing what was not — none of which she was authorized to do.
The gap between what nurses were doing and what nurses were permitted to do was the thing she decided to close. Her view, which she held for the next sixty years, was that this was not borrowing authority from medicine. It was nursing done to the top of its own competence, and it needed education rather than permission.
1965
Ford took the idea to Henry Silver, a pediatrician at the University of Colorado medical school, and in 1965 they opened a program to prepare nurses for the care of well children and the assessment of sick ones. They called the graduate a pediatric nurse practitioner.
It was funded initially with about seven thousand dollars. The first cohort was four nurses.
Opposition came from both sides. Physicians objected to nurses diagnosing. Nursing academics objected more sharply, arguing that a doctor-taught curriculum would make nurses into physician assistants and hand the profession's independence away. Ford's answer was that the model was a nursing model taught in a nursing school, and that the graduate answered to the nursing board.
She was right about the structure and the objection was not foolish; the argument over who controls advanced practice is still running, state by state, in the form of collaborative practice agreements.
After
In 1972 Ford became founding dean of the University of Rochester School of Nursing, where she built what she called the unification model — one faculty doing teaching, research and clinical practice rather than three separate groups.
She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 1971, named a Living Legend of the American Academy of Nursing in 1999, inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2011 and the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame in 2012, and given the Surgeon General's Medallion in 2020.
Ford died on January 22, 2025 in Wildwood, Florida, at 104. There were four nurse practitioners when she started and well over 350,000 when she died.
Related
- Nurse practitioner practice authority
- Levels of nursing
- Collaborative practice agreements
- Rural and frontier nursing
- Scope of practice
Sources
- Loretta Ford, for her training, war service, the 1965 program and her honors. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Loretta C. Ford, co-founder of the nurse practitioner profession. American Association of Nurse Practitioners. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Loretta Ford: celebrating a century of nursing greatness. University of Rochester Medical Center. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- CU Nursing establishes a reputation as a pioneering institution, 1948–1973. University of Colorado. Accessed September 9, 2026.