Marjory Gordon

Ph.D., RN, FAAN, FNI, was professor emerita at the Connell School of Nursing for 23 years. She was one of those rare visionaries whose work remains as relevant today as it was during its beginnings. Dr. Gordon was internationally known for her development of the Eleven Functional Health Patterns (FHP), an assessment framework that has provided generations of nurses with a format to organize patient data and develop a clinical judgment, i.e. a nursing diagnosis. She was at the forefront in work on clinical reasoning and nursing language development — a groundbreaking achievement that has given nurses a voice in patient care outcomes and has led to the adoption of nursing language for electronic medical recordkeeping. She was named a Living Legend in the American Academy of Nursing and was the author of multiple papers and books. It is in this spirit that Boston College and NANDA-International recognize Dr. Gordon’s work through the Marjory Gordon Program for Nursing Knowledge Development and Clinical Decision-Making.