“The nurse´s nurse and the force of nature”
By Dr Asta Thoroddsen, Chair of the ICNP Editorial Board
In November last year, Dr Virginia Saba passed away at the age of 95. She was a pioneer in the field of nursing informatics and the use of technology in nursing. Dr Saba’s mission was to ensure that nursing data could be used to make nursing care visible and, therefore, she developed the nursing terminology Clinical Care Classification (CCC) for nursing documentation. The expectations of using standardised nursing terminologies, such as CCC and the International Classification of Nursing Practice (ICNP), are to create valid data that can be used to demonstrate the impact of nursing care on patient outcomes, improve the quality and safety of nursing care and the representation of nursing knowledge. By using a nursing terminology, nurses increase control of their professional language that helps to clarify their autonomous dimension within health care professions and to give visibility to citizens´ health improvement sensitive to nursing care.
On 20-21 October 2022, a virtual workshop was hosted by the Friends of the National Library of Medicine (FNLM) in the United States, under the leadership of Dr Kathleen McCormick and in collaboration with FNLM, to “Honor the Legacy of Virginia Saba through Charting a Path Forward for Standardized Nursing Terminologies in Practice and Research”. Dr Saba was internationally known and in the workshop she was described “as the nurse´s nurse and the force of nature”. More than 40 speakers and 500 people from six continents participated in the workshop. As Chair of the ICN’s ICNP Editorial Board, I was invited to speak on the international panel on use, research and education on standardised nursing terminologies. Between panels, interviews with Dr Saba were played. In one of them, Dr Saba said:
“If you want to improve nursing care you have to code nursing care“.
She had a strong vision for the future and in another video she said:
“I have a firm belief that in the future, if we become visible, nursing practice will be revolutionized and we will truly be a profession of nurses with our own classification systems, bibliographic systems, and payment systems. We need to think “outside the box”. … We have a long way to go, but if we utilize information technology effectively, informatics will become an integral part of our profession and the health care industry. I do believe we have the knowledge and perseverance and I am convinced it will come to pass.”
Dr Saba authored numerous publications on nursing informatics and information computer technology. She co-authored the well-known textbook Essentials of Nursing Informatics with Dr Kathleen McCormick. The 1st edition was published in 1986 and 7th edition in 2021. Dr Saba received many awards during her lifetime: an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Athens; Honorary Doctor of Science from Excelsior College; and a Living Legend Award from the American Academy of Nursing, to name a few.
Dr Saba collaborated with ICN in seeking for alignment and harmonisation between ICNP and CCC some years ago. Team members from ICN and SabaCare examined whether terms or concepts within CCC had equivalent concepts within ICNP and whether the ICNP concepts could be categorised in the CCC framework. This, and similar work, has been published.
The nursing profession is indebted to Dr Saba, for her vision and true belief in that nurses should and could reach high by using information technology to create data to make the contribution of nurses and nursing visible. A true visionary and nursing legend has passed. Her name and work will remain with us for years to come.
[1] Virgina Saba quoted in The Big Picture: Nursing Informatics Comes of Age Dr. Virginia K.Saba Reflects on the Evolution of Nursing Informatics. An Interview with FITNE. 1 December 2021, Nanda International. Available here