Onset resident Mimi Secor was given the American Association of Nurse Practitioners’ Sharp Cutting Edge award for her work increasing the scope of practice for nurse practitioners for many decades.

The award is given to a nurse practitioner who has shown leadership and advanced nurse practitioner patient care and practice on a national level.

Secor received the award Wednesday, June 18 at the American Association of Nurse Practitioners conference in San Diego for her nearly 50 years of work as a nurse practitioner and pioneering the movement to allow nurse practitioners to write prescriptions.

Secor founded the first nurse practitioner owned practice in Cambridge during the 1980s where she and other nurse practitioners pushed for state legislation to allow them to write prescriptions.

“Early on I had to either call in prescriptions or get presigned prescriptions which wasn’t really proper but I had no choice since we didn’t have prescription writing legislation,” Secor said. “[The legislation] really authorized us, legally and professionally, to do what we do.”

Since then, 27 other states have authorized nurse practitioners to write prescriptions and according to the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, the number of nurse practitioners in the U.S. during the 1980s was between 22,000 and 24,000 and that number has increased to over 355,000.