Researching Florida Nurse Practitioner History: Looking for help to record our history!

Several years ago, we began this website project to record the amazing history of Nursing in Florida. As many of you may know, Dr. Loretta Ford, Co-Founder of the NP role in 1965 chose to retire in Florida and will be celebrating her 100th birthday at the end of 2020 - The year of the Nurse and Midwife and The Centennial for Women’s Right to Vote. In celebration of her centennial, we'd like to record the early history of the NP growth in Fl and present her with our own story!  

Many pioneer NPs were trained outside of Florida at first between 1965 to early 70's until certificate and master’s programs began here around 1971. We traced the earlies in state certificate program in 1971 in Palm Beach--any others? If you were a part of this early NP development, or know someone in this timeline, we hope you will contact us and share your contributions.  Simply respond to this message and we will contact you! Let's capture this history before we lose it. 

Looking for written history-letters, doucments, old certificates, diplomas for NP training, also photos and images of those early years. If you are able to let us record your personal history we can do that on ZOOM.

If you worked on projects, gave tesitmony to the legisltors or orther groups to promote NPs during this time we'd love to see your collection and share this!

If we do not save our history and contributions, then who will?!