title:
Massachusetts Nurse Practitioners History Project Collection
creator:
Massachusetts Nurse Practitioners Coalition
subject:
Nurse Practitioners; Nursing—Nursing as a profession; Patient-centered health care
Medically underserved areas; Nursing—Study and teaching; Nursing—Study and teaching (Preceptorship); Nursing—Study and teaching—Continuing nursing education; Nursing—Study and teaching (Graduate); Nursing—Philosophy of nursing. Nursing models; Nursing schools; Nursing—Nursing as a profession—Certification in nursing; Nursing—Nurse and physician or other health professionals; Nursing—Nurse and patient; Nurses—Prescription privileges—Law and legislation—Massachusetts; Nursing—Law and legislation; Primary care (Medicine); Community health nursing; Nursing—Mentoring in nursing; Nurse practitioners—Supply and demand—Massachusetts
description:
[Massachusetts Nurse Practitioners History Project Collection] consists of oral history interviews with nurse practitioners (NPs) conducted by members of the Massachusetts Coalition of Nurse Practitioners. The interviewees, mostly NPs who trained or practiced in Massachusetts in the early days of the profession. Together, these interviews paint a picture of how the role developed over time against the backdrop of a changing healthcare industry between the late 1960s and 2025. They also offer insights about the unique importance of Massachusetts in NP history. Narrators reflect on their motivations for becoming nurses, their paths through education, and the trajectories of their careers. Their narratives contain information about how major shifts in the field, such as new education standards and legislation granting full practice authority and prescriptive authority, influenced their experiences and those of their patients. Emergent themes include: how early NPs helped invent the role as they went along and often became leaders in a small field early in their careers; challenges faced by early NPs when pioneering the role, including shortages of preceptors and jobs and frequent lack of support from physicians and nurses; the varied experiences of those who focused on practice, teaching, scholarship, or some combination of the three; the importance of mentorship from both physicians and NPs at all stages of the career; models of training and preparation, including clinical experiences; labor organizing and self-advocacy in a range of work environments; forming professional organizations and advocating for the role at the local, state and national level; the importance of federal funding for NP education and the expansion of professional opportunities for NPs; the roles of prominent healthcare and education institutions that served as hubs of NP development, as well as smaller local providers like Harvard Community Health Plan that have shaped the role by training and employing large numbers of NPs; nuances of the many NP specialities; initiatives by American NPs to shape healthcare and nursing education internationally; and the challenges of balancing family life and multiple roles at once. Together the interviews also contain many perspectives on the philosophy of the role, revealing its core belief in approaching the patient as a whole person situated within a unique social context, building strong relationships between patient and provider, and its orientation towards meeting the needs of underserved patients (those who are elderly, chronically ill, physically or intellectually disabled, low-income, unhoused, facing access barriers due to race or language or immigration status, or are located in areas of the globe where there is less infrastructure for healthcare in general).
publisher:
Simmons University Archives (Boston, Mass.)
contributor:
date:
type:
MovingImage; Text
format:
mp4, PDF
identifier:
source:
Simmons University Archives (Boston, Mass.)
language:
English
relation:
coverage:
1930 - 2025, bulk 1970-2020
rights:
Material from the Simmons University Archives collections are made available for study purposes only. For more information, or to request rights to reproduce or reuse any material, contact the University Archives at [email protected].
