They care

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Linda Foxworthy ’82MSN

For 35 years, Linda Foxworthy worked as a nurse practitioner at the Brookside Community Health Center in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. The clinic served a distinctly overlooked population—she saw domestic violence, she saw gang homicides—and in her long tenure there, she eventually met and looked after the babies of people she had once looked after when they were babies. “Knowing people for such a long time adds to the kind of care you can deliver,” she says. “That’s rare these days.”

Her circle of care expanded in 1999, when a doctor at Brookside told her about his experience volunteering in the western highlands of Guatemala. One of Foxworthy’s friends encouraged her to go, so she did. It was a place of stunning beauty and stunning deprivation. Babies died because the families couldn’t afford to get to the hospital. Foxworthy and a doctor saw up to one hundred patients a day. She has gone back nearly every winter, bringing nurse practitioner students when she can, and she recently helped train local health promoters and took part in a program for the early detection and treatment of cervical cancer.

Her retirement from Brookside—“I was offered benefits I couldn’t refuse”—was short-lived. Since 2018, Foxworthy has worked part-time at a federally qualified health center outside of Boston, where most of her patients are immigrants and many of them Guatemalan. She has taken to precepting for current nurse practitioner students, given that nursing doesn’t have a formalized residency. She spends time in Vermont, too, and with her granddaughters in California. And she continues to visit the highlands of Guatemala, where she offers direct care while supporting new health initiatives, and where, she says, “it’s still really hard to figure out how to help.”

It seems Foxworthy has spent the bulk of her life trying to solve that challenge. Now 73 years old, she continues her work: “I’m not ready to retire.”