Moving Mountains: Creating the Nurse Practitioner and Rural EMS - Softcover

John Osborn, MD; Marie Osborn, ARNP

Softcover

ISBN 10: 087004656X ISBN 13: 9780870046568

Publisher: Caxton Press, 2025

Synopsis

Move over TV medical dramas! Moving Mountains is the real-life story of Idaho’s first nurse practitioner, Marie Osborn. In 1971, Marie founded an emergency clinic in rugged Sawtooth-Salmon River country, covering 6,000 square miles on 24/7 call. Moving Mountains tracks development of rural medicine, emergency services, and breaking the glass ceiling of male-dominated medicine. Time and again Marie survived conflicts with professional boards, legislatures, the insurance industry, and bitter Idaho winters – all at significant personal cost. For those interested in the origins of Nurse Practitioners, and to understand contemporary rural medicine issues, this heartwarming memoir breaks a trail so others may follow.

About this title

About the Author

Marie Osborn, ARNP, is Idaho's first Nurse Practitioner. She obtained her BSN from Ball State University in 1953, completed emergency medicine training at Harborview Medical Center/University of Washington in 1972, and was in the first class of the Family Nurse Practitioner Program at the University of Utah in 1975. Marie staffed the Salmon River Emergency Clinic and Stanley Ambulance from 1972–1999. After retiring from the Stanley Clinic, Marie continued to see patients in rural Idaho communities, then low-income clinics in Boise until 2012. She returns to her Sawtooth home and the mountains she loves as her health allows. John Osborn, MD, specializes in Internal Medicine and has provided care for military veterans since 1985, including as physician advisor to Camp Chaparral for Native American veterans with PTSD. John graduated from the College of Idaho in 1979, the University of Washington School of Medicine (1983) through the WWAMI program, and Internal Medicine Spokane (1986). Along with Derrick Jensen and George Draffan, he is an author of Railroads and Clearcuts: Legacy of Congress’s 1864 Northern Pacific Railroad Land Grant. From 1988–2000, John chronicled the closing of frontiers and historic change in America's Northwest as editor of the journal Transitions: www.lib.uidaho.edu/digital/transitions/ His work in ethics includes POLST (Washington State) and the One River, Ethics Matter project for the Columbia River. He is married to Rachael - they live on Vashon Island, where they garden and press apple cider.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Physicians as a profession began several thousand years ago. The nurse practitioner profession (NP) started in the 1960s. By 2020, the number of licensed NPs in the United States was over 300,000, and the profession is expanding internationally. This is the story of the first licensed NP, Marie Osborn. Although Marie Osborn was the first licensed, she was not the first NP. That distinction belongs to Loretta Ford. Advanced practice nursing started in Colorado in 1965 with Loretta Ford RN, who, along with Henry Silver MD, focused on underserved pediatric populations. Six years later, Idaho became the first state to license NPs. Marie, an RN committed to providing emergency services in Idaho's Sawtooth country, was the first licensed by Idaho. Marie, my mother, stood 4 feet 11 -- five feet in her cowboy boots. Her personal story as an RN, wife, and mother crochet into the creation stories of the NP profession and rural EMS. “Someone needs to do something,” Marie said. She knew the lack of rural healthcare in Idaho. That someone ended up being her. Once Marie started, she wouldn't stop. She was on a mission to prove that an advanced practice RN -- a woman -- could do it. For nearly 30 years, Marie was the sole healthcare provider, covering 6,000 square miles of Idaho's Sawtooth and Salmon River country.

Edition details

• Publisher: Caxton Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 087004656X
• ISBN 13: 9780870046568
• Binding: Perfect Paperback
• Number of pages: 365