Discussion: Nursing Languages NURS 658

DQ1 Discuss the advantages of standardizing nursing
languages, and describe how standardized nursing languages are applied in the
clinical setting.

Against the healthcare backdrop, nurses are the standouts. Men and women in nursing careers comprise the largest segment of healthcare workers, with frequent patient interactions—up to half of the hours worked by hospital-based nurses.1

Because of the depth and breadth of the role of these nurse leaders, effective communication is critical. Nurses must quickly share patient information with other nurses, doctors, and healthcare professionals. To accomplish this, the nursing profession has developed standardized languages—agreed-upon terms for clinical assessments—that help them to deliver information in a swift, clear, and effective way.

Benefits of Standardized Languages
The use of standardized nursing languages has many advantages for the direct care/bedside nurse, including better communication among nurses and other healthcare providers, increased visibility of nursing interventions, and improved patient care. These advantages for the bedside/direct care nurse are as follows:

BETTER COMMUNICATION AMONG NURSES AND OTHER HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS
Improved communication with other nurses, healthcare professionals, and administrators of the institutions in which nurses work is a key benefit of using a standardized nursing language. Physicians realized the value of a standardized language in 1893 (The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 2003) with the beginning of the standardization of medical diagnosis that has become the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) (Clark & Phil, 1999).

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A more recent language, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), provides a common language for mental disorders. When an obstetrician lists “failure to progress” on a patient’s chart or a psychiatrist names the diagnosis “paranoid schizophrenia, chronic,” other physicians, healthcare practitioners, and third-party payers understand the patient’s diagnosis. The ICD-10 and DSM-IV are coded by a system of numbers for input into computers. The IDC-10 is a coding system used mainly for billing purposes by organizations and practitioners while the DSM-IV is a categorization system for psychiatric diagnoses. The DSM-IV categories have an ICD-10 counterpart code that is used for billing purposes.

Nurses lacked a standardized language to communicate their practice until a task force that later became the North American Nursing Diagnosis Association (NANDA) was formed in 1973. Since then several more languages have been developed. The Nursing Minimum Data Set (NMDS) was developed in 1988 (Prophet & Delaney, 1998) followed by the Nursing Management Minimum Data Set (NMMDS) in 1989 (Huber, Schumacher, & Delaney, 1997). The Clinical Care Classification (CCC) was developed in 1991 for use in hospitals, ambulatory care clinics, and other settings (Saba, 2003). The standardized language developed for home, public health, and school health is the Omaha System (The Omaha System, 2004). The Nursing Intervention Classification (NIC) was published for the first time in 1992; it is currently in its fourth edition (McCloskey-Dochterman & Bulachek, 2004). The most current edition of the Nursing Outcomes Classification system (NOC), as of this writing, is the third edition published in 2004 (Moorhead, Johnson, & Maas, 2004). Both the NIC and the NOC are used across a number of settings.

Use of standardized nursing languages promises to enhance communication of nursing care nationally and internationally. This is important because it will alert nurses to helpful interventions that may not be in current use in their areas.

Discussion: Nursing Languages NURS 658