November 7, 2002
Ward named to American Academy of Nursing
Dr. Deborah Ward, who has successfully advocated for the rights of consumers and nurses through her leadership role with Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, has been inducted into the American Academy of Nursing.
Ward has applied her nursing knowledge to shape health care delivery and policies throughout her career. With a political science degree from Oberlin College, Ward took a job as a home health aide in rural Connecticut, an experience that led her to graduate studies in nursing at Yale. After working as a nurse practitioner with medically-underserved communities, she completed a Pew doctoral fellowship in health policy at Boston University, focusing her dissertation on the value of unpaid work by family caregivers.
As chair of the Board of Trustees for Group Health, the nation’s largest non-profit health maintenance organization, Ward has played an active role in shaping the primary care agenda. She is one of the few nurses nationally to ever hold such a position within the managed care system.
An associate professor of psychosocial and community health nursing who works “to bring the next generation of nurses into senior political and organizational spheres of influence,” she has also taught University courses on public policy.
Ward has brought her knowledge of primary care systems into the national arena as a participant in a program to foster collaboration between academic medical centers and managed care organizations. Along with Dr. Daniel Lessler, associate professor of medicine, she recently received a prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Partnerships for a Quality Education (PQE) grant to develop an innovative curriculum for clinicians in the management of diabetes.
An advisor and consultant to state and national nursing organizations, Ward has also served as a visiting professor on comparative health systems at the University of Basel, Switzerland.
