Ann participated in the Coalition in 1970, the first summer that the Coalition conducted multiple health fairs in middle and eastern Tennessee. She had just graduated from Vanderbilt School of Nursing.
Ann was instrumental in the establishment of structured followup care for clinical issues discovered at the Health Fairs. She helped devise systematic home visits which served to link people to needed care. These home visits also served to build trust and confidence within the communities, and inspiration for building community-run clinics.
Ann went on to become a national nurse leader with a scholarly focus on expanded role nursing and health care ethics. Her nursing research focused on moral distress in health care providers. She co-edited an edition of the Hastings Center Report, its first to focus on nursing ethics. She was senior editor of the definitive textbook on advanced practice nursing beginning in 1997, now in its sixth edition. That textbook helped to define emerging roles of nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, nurse anesthetists, and clinical nurse specialists. She helped develop the curriculum and standards for the first Doctorate of Nursing Practice degree. Ann retired in 2015 from the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Nursing, but she continued to be in demand as a speaker at international conferences until her untimely death.
Ann died in Richmond, Virginia on February 9, 2020.
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