Faye Abdellah

Nurse, educator, researcher

• Born: March 13, 1919
• Place of Birth: New York City, NY
• Died: February 24, 2017
• Place of Death: McLean, Virginia

• Education: Fitkin Memorial Hospital’s School of Nursing; Columbia University
• Significance: In a public health career that spanned more than seven decades, Faye Abdellah changed the traditional conception of the role of the nurse by moving the focus away from understanding illness and administering medical protocols and toward responding to patients as people with a complex of emotional and psychological needs.

Background

Faye Glenn Abdellah was born in New York City on March 13, 1919, the daughter of first-generation immigrants. Her father was Algerian, and her mother was Scottish. Concerned over raising children in a large city, Abdellah’s parents moved the family to New Jersey. She grew up near the small town of Neptune City, just south of Asbury Park, along the Atlantic Coast.

A precocious child with a gift for helping neighbors, Abdellah would later recount how she decided to pursue nursing on the afternoon of May 6, 1937. She was eighteen years old, and she and her brother had driven to Lakehurst Airfield to watch the arrival of the massive German zeppelin, the Hindenburg. When the aircraft exploded and crashed just above the mooring mast, Abdellah was among the first to get to the wounded. Many of the victims, who were strewn around the airfield, had deep burns. She felt helpless. When emergency responders arrived, Abdellah watched the care and confidence of their work, and she knew then she would pursue nursing.

She completed her nursing certificate at the nursing school at Fitkin Memorial Hospital (now part of the Jersey Shore Medical Center). Although such certification was all nurses were required to have, Abdellah felt that the school’s program of study, which stressed basic protocols nurses would apply across the board to all patients, was too limited. Nurses, she believed, needed to be more grounded in cutting-edge research and more in tune with individual patient needs.

Nursing Career

Abdellah continued her studies at Columbia University, completing a BA in nursing and then expanding her expertise by completing postgraduate work in both psychology and education. During this time, she worked as a nurse in a private school. After completing her doctoral work, she was determined to reshape the role of the nursing profession.

Her first teaching post was with the prestigious Yale University School of Nursing. Reviewing the textbooks available for nursing instruction, Abdellah became frustrated; the protocols did little to encourage hands-on care and treated nurses like robots completing rounds. Nurses were not expected to think or to approach a patient as an individual. Nursing programs did little to prepare nurses to actually work with patients. Within a year of her appointment, she gathered her colleagues and students outside Yale’s nursing building and dramatically burned a stack of the required textbooks—although she would have to pay for the books later, she recalled that the moment set her free.

Over the next decade, Abdellah, by gathering massive amounts of data from practicing nurses, created what she called the Twenty-one Problems. For Abdellah, elements of a patient’s recovery were best approached as problems that nurses were there to address. The protocol listed critical elements of patient care divided into three broad areas: physical needs (such as providing medicines, charting tests, ensuring adequate nutrition and hydration, and securing a stable and restful environment); emotional needs (such as listening to patient worries, addressing patient anxiety, and communicating clearly and regularly and honestly with the patient); and sociological needs (such as interacting and communicating with the patient’s family and friends and taking into account a patient’s background as part of recovery and treatment).

In 1949, Abdellah left private hospital work and joined the Commissioned Corps of the United States Public Health Service (USPHS), a uniformed branch of the federal government. After a stint overseas during the Korean War, Abdellah dedicated forty years to creating innovative templates for nursing. Her most notable creations include the Progressive Patient Care Protocol, which developed three stages for nursing care (intensive care, immediate care, and home care, the last introducing the revolutionary concept that nurses need to be involved in developing a patient’s self-care and regimens for recovery after a hospital stay), and the PACE standards (Patient Assessment of Care Evaluation), which asked patients themselves to respond to the effectiveness of nursing care.

In 1974, she became the first nurse commissioned as a two-star rear admiral. In 1981, she was named deputy surgeon general, the first time a nurse had been so honored. Over the next eight years, she worked tirelessly to promote public health awareness, most notably about AIDS and drug addiction (a topic that was part of First Lady Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No initiative). In addition, she began to work in gerontological care, particularly in the areas of hospice care and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

After her retirement from the USPHS in 1989, Abdellah undertook a global campaign to raise awareness of the changing role of nurses. She also cofounded the Graduate School of Nursing at the Uniformed Services University (USU) in 1993 and served as its first dean. She retired in 2002.

In 1994, she was the recipient of the inaugural American Academy of Nursing’s Lifetime Achievement Award, often called the Nobel Prize of nursing. She was named to the Nursing Hall of Fame in 1999 and to the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2000. She was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 2012.

Impact

Faye Abdellah is widely regarded as one of the most significant figures in nursing in the twentieth century. By introducing the ideas that nursing care needed to be grounded in researched data and that nurses cared for people, not patients, Abdellah created revolutionary templates for virtually all areas of hospital nursing care. As a teacher, as a researcher, and as a charismatic speaker, she pioneered nursing protocols that introduced the cornerstone concept that a nurse creates the therapeutic environment in which a patient can best cope with illness.

Personal Life

Abdellah retired from USU in 2002, after more than fifty years of working for the government. She developed Alzheimer's disease and died on February 24, 2017.

Bibliography

"Faye Glenn Abdellah." National Women’s Hall of Fame, www.womenofthehall.org/inductee/faye-glenn-abdellah/. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.

Johnson, Betty, and Pamela Webber. An Introduction to Theory and Reasoning in Nursing. 4th ed. Philadelphia: LWW, 2013. Print.

McEwen, Melanie. Theoretical Basis for Nursing. 4th ed. Philadelphia: LWW: 2014. Print.

Meleis, Afaf Ibrahim. Theoretical Nursing: Development and Progress. 5th ed. Philadelphia: LWW, 2011. Print.

Reed, Pamela. Perspectives on Nursing Theory. 6th ed. Philadelphia: LWW, 2011. Print.

Wayne, Gil. "Faye G. Abdellah: 21 Nursing Problems Theory." Nurseslabs, 30 Apr. 2024, nurseslabs.com/faye-g-abdellahs-21-nursing-problems-theory/. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.