Loretta Ford

Loretta Ford (1920 to 2025) was an American nurse and nursing educator who co-founded the first nurse practitioner program in the United States. Born in the Bronx and raised in New Jersey, she trained at Middlesex General Hospital, served as a first lieutenant in the United States Army Air Forces and then studied nursing and public health nursing at the University of Colorado, where she later took a doctorate in nursing education. Working as a public health nurse in rural Colorado, she saw gaps in care that nurses with specialised training could fill. In 1965 she and the pediatrician Henry Silver started the pediatric nurse practitioner program at the University of Colorado, which drew opposition from some nursing faculty who feared physicians would come to supervise nurses. From 1972 she was founding dean of the nursing school at the University of Rochester, where she developed the Unification Model of Nursing, joining education, research and clinical practice. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 1971, and she died in Florida at the age of 104.