Nurse Practitioner event celebrates memoir of first nurse practitioner
In recognition of Nov. 9 to 15 being the annual National Nurse Practitioner Week, Gonzaga University Nursing is hosting a presentation on "Moving Mountains: Creating the Nurse Practitioner and Rural EMS," featuring John Osborn, MD., Mike Nowling and John Roskelley.
The event on creating the nurse practitioner program and its importance in rural healthcare begins at 4:30 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 11, in Hemmingson Ballroom.
It is celebrating rural healthcare, looking at the current crisis and reviewing the legacy of Marie Osborn, ARNP, the first licensed nurse practitioner.
John, who is Marie's son and co-author of her memoir, Moving Mountains: Creating the Nurse Practitioner and Rural EMS, said her journey started with a pool-side conversation his then 40-year-old mother had with John Hutchison, head of the Idaho Hospital Association, during a conference in Sun Valley.
Four teens had just been badly hurt in a car accident at Galena Summit. I took nearly three hours for an ambulance to arrive. Then the ambulance drove them 60 miles to a hospital in Sun Valley.
"Someone has got to do something about the inequities of rural healthcare," Marie said.
John Hutchison arranged funds from the Kellogg Association for a local clinic to be developed in Stanley in 1971, which had three bars and was home to 33 people in the winter. In the summer, however, millions come to visit the Sawtooth National Recreation Area and Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. When someone was hurt, there was at that time no healthcare or emergency services other than the Forest Service.
After Marie asked a Vietnam Vet medic who lived in Stanley if he would train to be a physician's assistant and he said no, Marie, a registered nurse, realized that the someone who had to do it was her. Funds were raised so she could be trained at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, and then she did hundreds of hours more training in Southern Idaho.
A year later, she became the first state-licensed nurse practitioner in the U.S. and sole healthcare provider, opening the Salmon River Emergency Clinic to serve 6,000 square miles. Her story is in The Fig Tree at thefigtree.org/dec22/120122osbornruralclinic.html.
Marie provided health care in Stanley for 30 years, but she was not alone. It was a team effort of volunteer EMTs and ambulance drivers, local community supporters, physicians and nurses, pharmacists and elected officials.
The clinic became a teaching site for nurse practitioner students from Gonzaga and other universities, and medical students from the University of Washington.
The Stanley Clinic's most enduring teaching program in rural medicine has been the College of Idaho pre-med internship. It celebrated its 50th year in 2025, training more than 60 women and men who became doctors. Some of Marie's pre-meds are now retired from being doctors.
"We don't turn away someone who is sick or dying. That's not who we are," said Marie.
Today, there are 400,000 licensed nurse practitioners—in rural and urban areas.
"If we don't advocate for rural healthcare, it will be grim," said John. "We are losing rural hospitals and clinics, creating healthcare deserts as Congress cuts funds. Rural ambulance services, many depending on volunteer EMTS, are at risk. We see major retrenchments about caring for people.
"My mother set out to address rural healthcare inequities, saying someone needs to do something and that someone was her," he said. "Today, that someone is all of us. Nurse practitioners and physician's assistants are in an incredible position to help.
"Those entering the profession need to make a commitment to serve the underserved as my parents did," said John, who has cared for veterans for 40 years—as chief of medicine at the Spokane Veterans Administration and now at the Seattle VA ER.
John was one of four in 1975 in the first class starting pre-med training with his mother at the Stanley clinic. Eventually, she also worked with the Gonzaga School of Nursing to help train nurse practitioner students drawn to healthcare in rural communities as she was.
Mike, who is also speaking at the Nov. 11 presentation, was another of those pre-med interns with the College of Idaho. He is former president of The Heart Institute of Spokane and Family Home Care and Hospice.
The third speaker, John Roskelley, is a former Spokane County Commissioner and renowned mountain climber, who worked with miners in the Salmon River country the summer of 1972 when Marie opened the Salmon River Emergency Clinic. His chapter describes the challenge of caring for a co-worker suffering a massive heart attack in the high country.
John (Osborn), who also held a book discussion on Oct. 30 in Ketchum, commented that affordable healthcare as an issue in the federal government's shutdown draws attention healthcare and rural healthcare.
The book, Moving Mountains, is a primer for creating and sustaining a rural healthcare system, from setting up an ambulance service to raising money to keep the clinic doors open.
The book is also a memoir centered on Marie and her commitment to care for others. "She set out to provide healthcare to a place that had none, not to change the world, but to save lives in the wilds of Idaho. To do that, the world had to change," John said.
"I just wanted someone to do something about the inequities of rural healthcare in America," Marie wrote in the book. "Fate, or perhaps some higher power, intervened. Once I started, I could not and would not turn back."
For information, call 939-1290, email john@waterplanet.ws or register at forms.office.com/r/dzYB0VRKBC.
