Ford's association with the Sherpas stemmed from a 1979 conversation with the New Zealand mountaineer Edmund Hillary who was the first to ascend Mount Everest with his climbing partner Tenzing Norgay. Based on the conversation, Ford took up an offer to serve at the hospital that Hillary had set up in the Himalayas in Kunde, Nepal. The hospital is at an altitude of over and is amongst the highest hospitals in the world. Ford used the opportunity to take a break at age 55 from her doctoral duties in British Columbia, moving to a village in Nepal, treating Sherpas in the mountainous region. She started out serving a locum for six weeks to provide coverage for resident doctors, but returned to do more than five locums over the next ten years. When weather conditions grounded flights, she had to trek over multiple mountain passes to reach the hospital. The hospital brought birth control and immunisation to the region, and it also ended disease caused by lack of iodine which was endemic. She would recall the brief given to her by Hillary to get to the Himalayas, "He told me to take my Adidas runners, a stethoscope and an umbrella." Operating in the Himalayas, Ford respected the traditional healing methods of the Sherpas, including Buddhist practices. The Kunde hospital is now staffed by local doctors including one who was born at the hospital in 1983.
