Inge Madsen

My nursing carrier has always been about nursing informatics. It started 2 years after my degree in nursing. I had just started at a brand new university hospital full of computers – for the medical staff. The very foreseen director of the nursing staff wanted to change that - and my nursing informatics carrier was doomed.

I started as a part-time nursing working with development of systems. One thing lead to another. At the same time in the start of 1990 the development informatics in Health care exploded. Electronic documentation, - electronic communication, booking, Drug management systems. At the same time nursing informatics was started. Randi Mortensen was an early starter and took a great part in developing the ICNP. I took an active part in these projects, but at the same time the Danish Board of Health decided to collect all the existing medical classification under one umbrella: The Danish Health Care Classification, where I was appointed to be part of the developing executive stirring group. We tried hard to include nursing diagnoses, but the only thing that we could include was a homemade Danish intervention Classification.

Shorty after, I got the opportunity to attend NI Conference in San Antonio in 1994 with a poster about the Danish Nursing Intervention Classification. I meet, for the first time, Dame June Clark and learned about her and Norma Langs quotation:

”If you can not name it : You can not control it, finance it, teach it, research it or put it into policy..”

The wise word have followed me through my whole carrier in discussion on political top level and in education. As time has gone by, I have realized how import these words are, and nursing informatics plays a big part in reaching these very important goals.

As I mentioned, did the developing in Health Informatics started in the 1990. We did succeeded to have nursing representation in these national executive stirrings groups and as I was one of the few nurses with a master in Health Informatics, I was in most of the stirrings groups. It was some way easier to have a voice in these stirring groups now that I was more “than a nurse” and some of my fellow students from the Health Informatics program had a seat in the stirring groups, too.

In 1998 the Region where I was employed at a Health informatics specialist, a local development of an EHR started. Again, I did the representation of nursing, it was a long process.

After 5 years of development, we finally got to the implementation process. From paper to electronic documentation. Even though we have train the nurses so document in a structured way, it was hard.

After 20 years of development and implementation of EHR and other clinical documentations systems, I decided to join academia full time. Since I graduated from Aalborg University, I had hold a part time associated professor ship.

I decided it was time “teach it” and research it. So before we have the knowledge about nursing informatics and it many opportunities for developing nursing, we cannot….

So my final comment is: Let get united all over the world in order to spread the very important knowledge about nursing informatics.