Vernice Ferguson was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina on June 13, 1928. She grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where her father was a minister and her mother was a teacher. Ferguson volunteered at a hospital in high school. She taught junior high school science in Baltimore before she became a nurse. She received an undergraduate degree in nursing from New York University and a master's degree from Columbia University Teachers College. She began her career as a nurse at Montefiore Hospital on its NIH-funded Metabolic Neoplastic Research Unit.
From 1967 to 1970, Ferguson led the nursing service at the VA hospital in Madison, Wisconsin. Between 1972 and 1980, Ferguson headed the nursing department at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. In 1980, she became the chief nursing officer for the Veterans Administration, which employed around 60,000 nurses across the nation at that time. She retired in 1992. Ferguson helped to establish the Health Professions Scholarship Program during her tenure with the VA. Ferguson held teaching appointments at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the University of Illinois, Georgetown University, the University of Maryland, and the University of Pennsylvania.
She served as president of the American Academy of Nursing from 1981 to 1983 and as president of Sigma Theta Tau from 1985 to 1987.

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