Dean talks 50th anniversary of nurse practitioner degree

Note: 2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the nurse practitioner degree program; Nov. 8-14 is National Nurse Practitioner Week.

AUGUSTA, Ga. – Nurse practitioners have a reason to celebrate National Nurse Practitioner Week in style this year as 2015 marks the 50th anniversary of their degree program.

Dr. Lucy Marion, dean of Georgia Regents University’s College of Nursing, is a pioneer in nurse practitioner faculty practice and has been recognized by The Journal for Nurse Practitioners for helping develop the nurse practitioner role in the U.S. She helped start nurse practitioner based faculty practice in three universities: University of South Carolina, University of Illinois at Chicago and GRU. As an award-winning health behavior change researcher, Marion has focused on caring for high-risk populations due to factors such as poverty, homelessness and abuse. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners and served as president of South Carolina Nurses Association, National Organization of Nurse Practitioner Faculties and the Omicron Chapter of Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nursing from the University of South Carolina and her doctorate in nursing science from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In a new video, she discusses why nurse practitioners are important to health care and how the profession has changed in the past 50 years.

“Nurse practitioners blend traditional medicine with traditional nursing to create something nontraditional,” Marion said. “It was the need for more care, availability of capable community nurses and shortage of physicians that drove this movement. Beyond that, nurse practitioners started filling new roles, such as blending health care and care coordination for complex health conditions as primary care provider, hospitalist in acute and long term care and provider of integrated mental and physical health care.”

Marion is available to discuss:

• What care needs do nurse practitioners fulfill?
• How has the nurse practitioner profession changed in the past 50 years?
• What are the biggest challenges nurse practitioners face?
• Why do people who use nurse practitioners as primary care providers make fewer visits to the emergency room and have lower medication costs?

To schedule interviews with Marion, contact Arthur Takahashi at 706-830-9826. Video linked to in this advisory is available for broadcast and intended for use with information provided within this release. Credit is not required; however, we ask that you appropriately identify Marion and Georgia Regents University in the super and/or audio in broadcast.