Standardized Nursing Languages Essential for the Nursing Workforce

Abstract

The evolution of standardized nursing languages (SNLs) has been occurring for more than four decades. The importance of this work continues to be acknowledged as an effective strategy to delineate professional nursing practice. In today's health care environment, the demand to deliver cost-effective, safe, quality patient care is an essential mandate embedded in all health reform policies. Communicating the contributions of professional nursing practice to other nurses, health providers, and other members of the health care team requires the articulation of nursing's focus of concern and responses to these concerns to improve patient outcomes. The visibility of the electronic health record (EHR) in practice settings has accelerated the need for nursing to communicate its practice within the structure of the electronic format. The integration of SNLs into the patient record offers nurses an opportunity to describe the focus of their practice through the identification of nursing diagnosis, interventions and outcomes (IOM, 2010). Continued development, testing, and refinement of SNLs offers nursing an accurate and reliable way to use data elements across populations and settings to communicate nursing practice, enable nursing administrators and leaders in health care to delineate needed resources, cost out nursing care with greater precision, and design new models of care that reflect nurse-patient ratios and patient acuity that are data driven (Pesut & Herman, 1998). The continued use of nursing languages and acceleration of nursing research using this data can provide the needed evidence to help link nursing knowledge to evidence-driven, cost-effective, quality outcomes that more accurately reflect nursing's impact on patient care as well as the health care system of which they are a part. The evaluation of research to support the development, use, and continued refinement of nursing language is critical to research and the transformation of patient care by nurses on a global level.

Use of Electronic and Paper‐based Standardized Nursing Care Plans to Improve Nurses’ Documentation Quality in a Nigerian Teaching Hospital

“…When nurses use the SNCPs for planning and documenting care, it will provide a longitudinal record of nursing care rendered to the patients and prevent “missing nursing records.” This can be used to guide nursing research, in linking patients' health outcomes to nursing care. The documentation can also be used for proving nursing rewards for a positive nursing outcome as well as evidence‐based practices as well and make greater precision of nursing care cost (Jones et al., ). The result can help nurse managers to plan staffing based on the nursing needs of patients.…”

“…They reduce variation in documentation, provide same level of practice and consistent approach to care across settings (Kent & Morrow, ), make nurses’ work visible (Hayrinen, Lammintakanen & Saranto, ; Tastan et al., ) and improve nursing communication, patient's safety and outcome (Park & Lee, ). SNTs are used to create standardized care plans in EHRs and provide clinical decision support for nurses (Jones, Lunney, Keenan, & Moorhead, ; Lundberg et al., ; Rutherford, ; Shekelle, Morton, & Keeler, ). This has been reported to improve communication (Thede & Schwiran, ) and quality of nursing care (Fossum, Ehnfors, Svensson, Hansen, & Ehrenberg, ).…”

Advanced Nursing Process quality: Comparing the International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP) with the NANDA‐International (NANDA‐I) and Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC)

“…SNLs allow the proper keeping and refinement of nursing documentation as part of the electronic health record (EHR), thus increasing visibility of nursing as a scientific discipline (Jones et al . , Keenan et al . ).…”

Measuring the effects of guided clinical reasoning on the Advanced Nursing Process quality, on nurses’ knowledge and attitude: Study protocol

“…Nursing care must be transparently described due to financial, legal (Health Insurance Act—KVG, 2016) and professional requirements (Müller‐Staub, Abt, Brenner, & Hofer, ). This can be achieved by applying and documenting the nursing process with standardized nursing languages (SNLs) (Escalada‐Hernández et al, ; Estrada & Dunn, ; Hariyati, Yani, Eryando, Hasibuan, & Milanti, ; Jones, Lunney, Keenan, & Moorhead, ; Pérez Rivas et al, ). This approach increases patient safety and leads to better nursing‐sensitive outcomes (Pérez Rivas et al, ).…”