Deborah Vasbinder Dillon, right, is embraced by her sister, Darlene Vasbinder-Calhoun, at their induction into the Brookfield Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame.
This story is one of a series on the Brookfield Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame’s Class of 2023.
Deborah Vasbinder Dillon was a good student in high school – after all, she was inducted into the National Honor Society – but she was not the kind of student that her sister, Darlene A. Vasbinder-Calhoun was.
Vasbinder-Calhoun, Dillon’s twin, was valedictorian for the Brookfield High School Class of 1974, and could handle classes like chemistry and geometry. Dillon couldn’t.
“I wasn’t valedictorian,” Dillon said. “I wasn’t co-valedictorian. I wasn’t even in the top 10. Those are my disclaimers. But, that’s OK. Being a twin, I knew that she was going to college. Financially, my family, they couldn’t afford one. How could they afford two?”
Dillon followed “the business track,” taking classes such as typing, bookkeeping and stenography. She got a job right out of high school with an insurance company in Sharon while her sister was on her way to a career in medicine.
But, something funny happened. Dillon’s career started heading in the direction of her sister’s.
One of her jobs with the insurance company was to review the medical exams of people applying for life insurance, and she would discuss them with the nurse who performed the exams.
“We would talk … and I thought, ‘Hmm. Nursing seems pretty interesting,’” Dillon said.
Deborah Vasbinder Dillon received her Brookfield Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame plaque from Dan Deramo.
Dillon also talked about nursing with former Brookfield High School nurse Maud McBride, and then enrolled in the Sharon Regional School of Nursing. After graduation, she worked as a bedside nurse.
“Nursing was kind of like a trade school, like a lot of careers were,” Dillon said. “Now, it is a profession, and you really should have a bachelor’s degree as entry into practice. I went back to Youngstown State and got my bachelor’s degree.”
Going back to school became a recurring theme. Dillon ended up graduating five times, earning more degrees than her sister.
Now a nurse practitioner, Dillon is an associate professor and director of the Adult-Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner Program at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh. She sees herself as preparing the next generation of nurse practitioners, and pushing for nurse practitioners to be able to practice medicine without being supervised by a medical doctor.
The difference between a nurse practitioner and a doctor is the “educational preparation,” Dillon said.
“Nurse practitioners go to nursing school and physicians go to medical school,” she said. “As far as what we do when we’re practicing, it’s identical.”
That’s not how the governing authorities of 24 states, including Pennsylvania and Ohio, see it, but Dillon is trying to change that.
“When I was in Virginia, I was one of the nurse practitioners that was instrumental in getting that passed in Virginia,” Dillon said. “Ohio, Pennsylvania, we’re a little behind the times and it’s gonna take a lot of work. We have a strong American Medical Association, but that’s OK. Everything doesn’t happen overnight.”
Although she never could have predicted the arc of her career and educational choices when she was in high school, she now sees each one as a natural progression of what came before – and all connected to her experience in high school.
“The things that I learned in high school about leadership, about responsibility, about professional accountability are things that I carried with me throughout my life,” Dillon said. “Education is precious, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s in an academic setting or a trade school or less formal setting.”
