Alumni Profile: Richard Ricciardi, MS ’91
Service runs through retired Col. Richard Ricciardi’s career, from his 31 years in the Army to his current position as the 2019-21 president of Sigma, the international honor society of nursing.
Ricciardi, PhD, MS ’91, CRNP, FAANP, FAAN, was commissioned as an officer out of SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in New York, where he earned his bachelor’s degree, beginning as a staff nurse at William Beaumont Army Medical Center at Fort Bliss in Texas. A few years later, he earned a certificate from the University of Colorado to practice as a nurse practitioner (NP), and while stationed at Fort Meade in Maryland, he precepted UMSON NP students, which led him to choose UMSON to pursue his own advanced practice nursing degree. He entered the pediatric primary care NP specialty (then a master’s program), focusing on adolescent and young adult populations – the age of many of his servicemember patients. At UMSON, he attained “the scientific knowledge and clinical and leadership skills that catapulted my growth as a clinician and a leader,” he says.
While working from 2009-11 on a large clinical trial, with Congressionally directed funding, examining the effects of mild traumatic brain injury on servicemembers fighting in post-9/11 conflicts, his regular briefings at the Pentagon taught him how policy creates change.
He joined the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in 2010 to better understand “the complexity of health care delivery in the U.S.,” he says, and shifted his research focus from clinical to health services research. He also became involved with Sigma and eventually was elected president in 2019. He now serves as professor and health policy faculty at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., but leading Sigma has allowed him to continue to focus on expanding access and improving the quality of health care internationally and on advocating for the nursing profession.
Sigma, which has more than 135,000 members in 100 countries, is politically neutral but supports policies “that strengthen the role of nurses as key leaders in health care.” The president’s main roles are to guide the organization in overall strategy, relationship building, fiscal responsibility, and resource development. For example, Ricciardi co-authored Sigma’s statement condemning systemic racism, and under his leadership, a new Sigma chapter in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has worked to develop the country’s nursing profession as part of its Healthcare Transformation Strategy.
Ricciardi sees primary care as a major theme in current health policy, including improving access to care, attracting more professionals to primary care, and re-engineering primary care delivery models and reimbursement. He also emphasizes the importance of involving more nurses in decision-making; making health care universally accessible; and, of course, controlling the spread of COVID-19.
It’s not all policy for Ricciardi, though – he also provides care for largely uninsured patients at Mercy Health Clinic in Montgomery County, Maryland, as a family NP. And, from May to December 2020, he was temporarily recalled by the Army as medical director at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri (a military training hub), leading COVID-19 and public health operations and treatment.
Ricciardi says his dream is a health care system that focuses on the whole person. “Nursing is a noble profession that uniquely blends science and humanity that meets patients and communities where they are at,” he says, “partnering with them to improve their health and well-being.”
THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE SPRING 2021 ISSUE OF MAGAZINE.