Jill D. Cochran, Ph.D., APRN

Photo by WVSOM Marketing Department

By Staci Miller

Born in the rural coal mining town of Quinwood, WV, Jill Cochran, Ph.D., APRN, was influenced by her parents to serve the community. They managed a small department store, which was the heart of the town, and worked with food pantries and their church even in the store’s last years of operation. Cochran believes they left a legacy of love in a fading town. Growing up in a small community that faced various levels of poverty drove her to serve people as her parents did in the past.

After fulfilling her dream of becoming a registered nurse and marrying an agricultural worker, she moved to Romney, WV. Cochran worked in a number of small rural hospitals, and most were run by the community and were more than two hours from a larger medical facility.

“At that time, many hospitals didn’t have physicians on-site 24/7 like they do today,” Cochran recalls. “Most of the time doctors were called in for emergencies, new admissions and to do rounds.”

The shortage of providers and the long distance to large, well-funded medical institutions led Cochran to make another career change to become a nurse practitioner to better serve patients.

“As one of the first nurse practitioners in a three-county area, I was not immediately accepted into the professional health care ranks,” she says. “Even other nurses didn’t understand the difference between a nursing assistant and a nurse practitioner. My first exam room was a renovated rest room that barely had room for an exam table. When trying to call in a report to the local emergency department, the physician would not take the report from me and demanded another physician give the report. There were usually no other physicians in the rural clinics, so I learned to change my voice pretty well back then. I was able to keep my head down and just do good care. My patients never questioned my credentials and gave me so much gratitude for my help.”

Despite these challenges and working full time, Cochran was committed to learning more and doing more to understand health behaviors and problems in West Virginia. Seeing obesity problems, especially in pediatrics, was heartbreaking. She also saw the overwhelming population of infants and children impacted by substance use and the need to help grandparents and foster parents manage infants in withdrawal. With so many people needing help and so little resources available, she did all she could and considered herself a career student pursuing one degree after another. Before online classes were available, Cochran engaged in long commutes for evening and weekend classes, including earning her diploma in professional nursing and bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from West Virginia University.

Today, Cochran is an associate professor at the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine and a family nurse practitioner at Pocohontas Memorial Hospital in Buckeye, WV. She feels privileged to be part of this institution now educating and guiding students on their journey to becoming osteopathic physicians. In addition to being engaged in her traditional profession and meeting required standards, being a faculty member is challenging. She works with other faculty to build curriculum, teach classes and support research with students and other faculty.

All of the faculty and staff at WVSOM work to ensure students pass all aspects of their boards and receive a clinical and scientific education that can take them wherever they want to practice medicine. Cochran has found success in mentoring the whole student, which includes addressing personal struggles as well.

“Students are often homesick and disillusioned by the amount of work it takes to get to the end of the semester or even the end of the program,” Cochran says. “Oftentimes this can be as simple as a coaching session that lets the student know that they have resources to help within the school. Sometimes a person needs validation that what they are experiencing is difficult but that they have what it takes to keep going.”

Watching people pull themselves up by their bootstraps motivates her. Cochran believes people are the product of their environment but also that they all seek to better that environment as their lives progress, making them who they are in the present.

“I consider myself a blend of all the people I have had in my life, including my hardworking parents and the physicians and nurses who were brilliant in knowledge and caring,” Cochran says. “I consider that the best gift ever.”