Alison Marshall �00, M.S.N., RN, FNP-C, came to nursing in a roundabout way. Initially a pre-med student as an undergraduate at Boston College, she switched her major to sociology and took a course in the medicalization of childbirth. That summer, she got an internship at a Veterans Administration hospital in her hometown of Denver, and when she watched the nurse practitioners at work, she was hooked. 淚 knew that was what I wanted to do,� she says.
Marshall, who holds a master degree from Yale University School of Nursing, has worked as a family nurse practitioner at the South Boston Community Health Center since 2005. 淚 believe that health care is a right, not a privilege,� she says. Many of her patients at the clinic presented with sexually transmitted infections, and she took a course with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to learn more about prevention. She went on to become an instructor at the Sylvie Ratelle STD/HIV Prevention Training Center of New England and lectures widely on prevention and contraception.
For the past year and a half, she has been associate professor of practice and director of the Family Nurse Practitioner Program at Simmons College. Teaching, she says, rejuvenates her. As a clinical instructor at Boston College, she wants to instill in her students a love of the profession. 淚 want my students to听understand that we are coming from this gorgeous, long tradition of nursing, and we are going to do this tough thing and do it our way.
淚 want them to understand the beauty of the human body and how it works and how it can fail us, but that those failures can be recognized and fixed. I want them to be secure that the best medicine is prevention,� she says.听
擯atti Hartigan, photograph by Lee Pellegrini
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