Robin Mangan was born an Air Force brat in San Antonio, TX. She spent her childhood in different locations around the world and learned to appreciate the diversity in people everywhere.

The first time she attended college (a very long time ago), she was working toward a degree in Public Relations. She got married to Louis in her junior year of college and soon thereafter began having babies; five babies in six-and-a-half years. This stopped her from attaining her Public Relations degree. 

After four moves, she ended up in Idaho, and luckily for her, Lost Rivers Medical Center (LRMC) joined with two other small hospitals and Eastern Idaho Technical College to have a distance learning program in nursing to train LPNs that would stay in the area. At age 39, she began again. It was a part-time program that took three years, much time studying and much travelling all over southeastern Idaho for clinical hours to complete. In January of 2025, she will have been a nurse for 22 years.

Working in a rural area is very different from working in an urban or suburban area where there are many resources available to patients and providers. She noticed that in the Lost River Valley, which encompasses Willow Creek Summit, above Mackay, all the way to Butte City, below Arco, there were many people with diabetes. Unfortunately, many of these people had limited income and/or no way to travel to a larger area to have prediabetic or diabetic education, or learn about prediabetes. Consequently, many of them had very poor health or were on their way to having very poor health. This situation, and the fact that she was a prediabetic, sparked her passion for teaching others to care for themselves in order to increase the quality of their lives and also possibly extend their lives. She currently works for LRMC as the Population Health Nurse Manager to increase preventative care in the local population, coaches DPP classes, teaches individual diabetes education and does outreach events in the community. She says she “loves her job!"