Reflections of a Nurse Practitioner

By Margaret Flinter, APRN

I was sitting in the Homer Babbidge Library at the University of Connecticut on a gorgeous fall day in 1973 when I read about a new nursing role, nurse practitioners, and how a group of nurse practitioners were making a big difference at a Boston clinic. Note to self: remember this!  I went on to graduate with my Bachelor of Science in Nursing in June, and off I went, immersing myself in experiences from rural public health to ICU (in that order!) to genetics, but always still remembering that story about the “new” pediatric nurse practitioners in Boston who were making a difference for their patients. 

Later, when I read Dean Donna Diers’s essay on the mission of the Yale School of Nursing—to radically change the American healthcare system—I knew I was headed to Yale. And when I read Health and the War on Poverty by Dr. Karen Davis, now President of the Commonwealth Foundation, I knew my work would be to improve the health of people and communities.

And so I did. The National Health Service Corps took me through a Masters degree at Yale and sent me to the Community Health Center, Inc. (CHC). At that time, in 1980, it was a 10-person neighborhood clinic in the north end of Middletown, Connecticut. I was blessed beyond belief to land in a setting with a brilliant community organizer /entrepreneur/activist, Mark Masselli, and a rock solid family practice physician, Carl Lecce. Much of what I learned about what it means to be a family nurse practitioner—and a primary care provider—I learned in those first few years, building on the lessons of Yale with the experiences of my practice partner, Dr. Lecce. It has been 30 since we began building a truly transformative primary care organization. CHC is now in twelve Connecticut cities, delivering care from well over a hundred locations with a staff of 500 and 70,000 patients.
 
The thrill—the total pleasure—of taking care of people, of being their primary care provider, of clinical, diagnostic and management challenges, is a feeling I relish. And although I am doing exclusively administrative and policy work right now, I take enormous pride and pleasure in the fact that my CHC colleagues and I started the country’s first formal Nurse Practitioner Residency Training program for new nurse practitioners who, like me and my colleagues, find service to the most vulnerable and underserved populations to be a professional calling.

These days, when I walk down Main Street in Middletown, I still see the patients I took care of over the years. Some were merely a blue spot on a pregnancy test when their mom was my patient.  Some now have babies of their own. Some have had terribly, terribly hard lives, and I meet them at Main Street’s soup kitchen or homeless shelter. Sometimes they stop me. “Are you Doctor Margaret?” asked a woman just the other day. (I was Doctor Margaret, our physician, Carl, was Doctor Lecce.) “You took care of me and my sister when we were little girls, my name is Emily.” I remembered her immediately, and much to her surprise, I also remembered her sister, both of their birth weights, their major childhood highs and lows, and their mom. But it didn’t surprise me. Whether we are nurse practitioners, primary care providers or physicians’ assistants we form intensely strong bonds of caring for our patients. We know them in their lives, in their communities over time.

Margaret Flinter, APRN, is Vice President and Clinical Director, Community Health Center, Inc. Middletown, CT and Director, Weitzman Center for Innovation in Community Health and Primary Care, Middletown, CT