Content area
Full Text
This column will highlight nurses with interesting career paths or roles. Consider sharing your life story with your colleagues who may be thinking about a new career direction. Contact Editor Joyce P. Griffin-Sobel, RN, PhD, AOCN®, APRN-BC, at [email protected].
Every nurse in an advanced practice role adds his or her own imprint. This month, we will look at two nurse practitioners (NPs) who have carved out very unique positions.
Tuong-Vi Ho's Path to Her Current Position
Tuong-Vi Ho (Vi), RN, MSN, FNP, is an NP in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Vi is from Vietnam. As a young woman, she worked at an orphanage in Saigon run by Seventh Day Adventists while the country was under siege. The church offered her the opportunity to be evacuated, and she was airlifted out of Vietnam three days before Saigon fell to the Communists. Vi was 21 years old when she arrived in Loma Linda, CA, with one change of clothes, her birth certificate, and very, little money.
She settled in Texas because the climate was so similar to that of Vietnam. Vi then began her lifelong pursuit of education, obtaining licensed vocational nursing certification and getting an associate's degree in nursing. At the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Houston, Vi received her bachelor's degree in nursing, followed by her master's degree as a clinical nurse specialist in oncology. She subsequently completed postmaster's certificates as a geriatric NP, adult NP, and family NP. Currently, Vi is a doctoral student at...