Informatics: The Standardized Nursing Terminologies: A National Survey of Nurses’ Experience and Attitudes—SURVEY II: Participants’ Perception of the Helpfulness of Standardized Nursing Terminologies in Clinical Care

Abstract

This is the fifth column reporting the results of a survey addressing nurses' attitudes and perceptions regarding standardized nursing terminologies, and completed by the authors in the fall of 2011. Prior columns have examined the demographics of our respondents and their familiarity with the American Nurse?.Association (ANA), standard ized nursing.terminologies (Schwirian & Ih.iad.fi> 2Q12); educational preparation for using the.terminologies, (Thede & Schwirian, 2013b): users perception .of confidence in using the..term in.ologi.es (Ihe.de & Schwirian ,.20.13.0 ; and offsets of documenting with sta nda rdized nursing, terminologies (Thede & Schwirian 20.13a*)In this column, we will report users' opinions about the helpfulness of a terminology in actual clinical practice. The findings presented below are from those respondents who answered 'yes' to the following three questions about the terminology: (a) are you familiar with the terminology?, (b) have you used it in some way?, and (c) have you used this particular terminology in actual patient care?Table 1 and Figure 1 illustrate the percentage of clinical users of a terminology who found the terminology helpful in actual clinical practice.; With the exception of the International Classification of Nursing Practice (ICNP) terminology, for which there were only four responses, more than 60% of clinical users of the nursing-specific terminologies found them helpful in clinical patient care. The Clinical Care Classification (CCC) users and the Omaha System users gave the most positive responses as noted in Table 1. Users of the interdisciplinary terminologies, Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Code (LOINC) and Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terminology (SNOMED CT), had the least positive perceptions regarding the helpfulness of the terminology in clinical practice. For the nursing-specific terminologies, North American Nursing Diagnosis Association, International (NANDA-I) and the Nursing Outcomes Classification (NOC) had relatively high percentages of users who did not find the terminology helpful in clinical practice.Tasks for Standardized TerminologiesClinical users of a terminology who answered 'yes' to the question about whether a terminology was helpful in clinical practice were then asked, In what ways was X (the specific terminology) helpful to you? A list of possible choices followed (below). Participants could check as many options as they felt were relevant and could also add other options.* Organizing patient care* Planning care* Generating appropriated outcomes* Generating appropriate interventions* Retrieving information on the same term for many patients* Other (please specify) or commentsTable 2 reports the numbers of respondents who selected each task and the percentage of clinical users of that terminology who found it helpful in that area. The bottom line provides the overall average of the helpfulness of the terminologies for each task/option. If one looks at this data for all the terminologies, planning care (64/1%) was found to benefit most from terminology use while retrieving information was found to benefit the least number of patients, followed closely by organizing patient care (53.7%). Because these terminologies have different foci, the percentages for each task may not be exactly comparable between the terminologies. For this reason, each terminology will be explored separately, along with some 'free text' tasks that respondents entered for that terminology.Nursing Specific TerminologiesMost of the ANA recognized, standardized terminologies are nursing specific; that is, they have more in common with nursing than any of the other health disciplines. This does not mean that they cannot be used in other disciplines; rather it means that they address many specific nursing situations, not only the dependent functions of nursing, but also independent nursing functions. …