Lorna Finnegan has two loves: nursing and teaching.
In a career spanning 16 years, she has succeeded in combining them. She has worked as a nurse practitioner and is a nursing teacher at St. Xavier University on Chicago’s Far Southwest Side.
“Combining the two disciplines has been really exciting from a career standpoint,” says Finnegan, 37, who lives in Evergreen Park.
“As a nurse practitioner, I love working with patients. But I also love taking a class of students and watching them grow over the semester.”
Finnegan teaches in the baccalaureate nursing program at St. Xavier, 3700 W. 103rd St. Since she began there in 1987, she has taught courses including community health nursing and health assessment.
As part of a university outreach program, she also has run several health fairs. “In 1988, I helped run a school health fair for just the faculty and staff,” she says. “In 1989, I came up with the idea of branching out and inviting the community at large.”
Last year she ran a children’s health fair at a parochial elementary school in Evergreen Park.
In the 1992-93 school year, Finnegan took a break from teaching to create a program leading to an advanced degree for nurse practitioners.
Nurse practitioners are registered nurses with master’s degrees who can conduct physical exams, take medical histories, diagnose and treat minor illnesses, order laboratory tests, and counsel and educate patients. In many states, but not in Illinois, they also can prescribe medication.
“When I came here, what was on my mind was the need for a nurse practitioners program,” she says.
She conferred with St. Xavier staff members and wrote a proposal for a program. Last year, the school received a federal grant to establish a program, and Finnegan spent the school year preparing it.
The two-year program will begin this fall, and program graduates will have master’s degrees in nursing.
Included in the program are courses on community health, such as primary care with families, which focuses on preventive medicine, and management of common health problems in primary care, which focuses on recognizing health problems.
“Creating the program has been exciting and challenging,” Finnegan says. “My colleagues and I actually feel like we’ve given birth to something.”
Finnegan has worked as a nurse practitioner at the health maintenance organization at Michael Reese Hospital (now Humana Hospital-Michael Reese) and at the University of Illinois’ Austin Health Care Center on the West Side.
“The range of her work is not surprising, as Laura is someone who really takes the initiative,” says Mary Lebold, dean of St. Xavier’s School of Nursing. “She sets very high standards for herself, and she’s committed to the students and community here.”
Finnegan didn’t plan on a career in health care. A native of Chicago’s Southwest Side, she had no clear career plans when she graduated from Kennedy High School in 1974.
“I was planning to go to the University of Illinois, Chicago, but at the last minute, it seemed overwhelming, so I worked as a secretary for a year in the Sears Tower,” she recalls. “I was just totally disgruntled with that job and decided I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life.”
Finnegan had heard about a nursing school at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park and decided to sign up for the two-year diploma program. “Nursing was always sort of in the back of my mind when I was growing up,” she says. “I decided to get serious about it.”
In 1977, she received her nursing diploma and went to work at the University of Chicago Hospitals’ coronary intensive care unit.
She decided to return to school and began working on a bachelor’s degree in nursing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 1979, she went to work at the University of Illinois Hospital as a surgical intensive care unit nurse, and she finished her degree the next year.
“I also began to get restless and had this desire to share what I knew with other students,” she recalls.
She was offered a job at Little Company of Mary in 1980 to teach surgical and coronary intensive care nursing in the nursing diploma program. She remained at the school until it closed in 1983.
“At the time, I had my first daughter, so I took a leave for about a year,” she says.
The next year, she took a job with the Michael Reese HMO, working part time in obstetrics and gynecology at a South Side outpatient clinic.
“It was the first time that I was working outside of the hospital setting, and I was really focusing on a lot of the teaching and counseling that goes along with nursing,” Finnegan recalls. “I decided I wanted to broaden my focus and be out in the community. Also, at the same time, I was exposed to nurse practitioners and I really liked the role. I knew I wanted to do something with that.”
In 1986, she moved to a home health-care agency at Little Company of Mary, “visiting homes of patients who were just discharged from the hospital and needed a little ongoing supervision,” she says.
After her second child was born in 1986, she took a second leave of absence. During that time she returned full time to UIC for a master’s degree in nursing, focusing on public-health nursing. The program exposed her extensively to the concept of nurse practitioners.
“I loved the role of nurse practitioner because it really provided a sense of autonomy and the ability to deliver care independently,” Finnegan says.
Finnegan has lived in Evergreen Park since 1982 with her husband, Kevin, a Chicago Transit Authority manager, and their two daughters and two sons, whose ages range from 1 to 9.
In 1987, after finishing her master’s degree, Finnegan started working again at the Michael Reese HMO as a nurse practitioner. “I loved doing that, but I realized I missed teaching,” she says.
That year, Finnegan applied to St. Xavier and began teaching community-health nursing.
“Working with students is a wonderful experience,” she says. “A couple of years ago, I had two students who helped us (acquire) the grant for the nurse practitioner program. Their work qualified as independent study projects toward their master’s degrees in community-health nursing. One was a school nurse, the other a hospital nurse.
“After they graduated, they both went on to better positions. . . . So not only did they help the program, but as instructors and mentors, we were able to help them.”
Interest in the nurse practitioners program has been strong, Finnegan says. “We promised the government that we would come up with four students for the program by September of 1992,” she says. “We came up with 28, and now we’re getting four to five calls a day from prospective students.” The course has 28 students enrolled for fall.
Because of health-care reform, Finnegan expects nurse practitioners to garner attention in the next few years. There are about 600 certified nurse practitioners in Illinois. The state currently has two nurse-practitioner graduate programs: at UIC and Rush University (part of Chicago’s Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center). When the program gets under way, Finnegan will be teaching courses on topics such as preventive medicine and management of common health problems.
Since joining St. Xavier, Finnegan has also begun work on a doctorate at UIC.
In another project, Finnegan has written a grant proposal to open a nursing center at Gladstone Elementary School on Chicago’s Near West Side.
“We would staff the facility with St. Xavier faculty and students such as nurse practitioners and community-health nurses who would conduct physicals, give immunizations and run health fairs,” she says. “We would also have a very strong educational component.
“We believe that nursing is a practiced profession. When we open this nursing center, I hope to take a caseload of clients myself as a nurse practitioner.”
Finnegan then plans to write a grant proposal to expand the St. Xavier nurse practitioners program to more minority students. “Then they can go back to their communities and fill the need in medically underserved areas,” she says.
“I see this program constantly evolving, and I’m excited about that. I don’t ever want to be stagnant.”
