Informatics: The Standardized Nursing Terminologies: A National Survey of Nurses’ Experience and Attitudes—SURVEY II: Participants’ Education for the Use of Standardized Nursing Terminology “Labels”

Abstract

We conducted two national Internet surveys of nurses related to their use of standardized nursing terminologies recognized by the American Nurses Association (ANA). The results of Survey I were reported in a previous OJIN Informatics Column, The Standardized Nursing Terminologies: A National Survey of Nurses' Experiences and Attitudes - Survey I (Schwirian & Thede. 2012J. The results from Survey II are being distributed in several reports. The first of these reports was published in OJIN as The Standardized Nursing Terminologies: A National Survey of Nurses' Experience and Attitudes (Schwirian & Thede. 20121. In that column, we reported the demographics of our participants and compared the extent of their familiarity with each of the terminologies between Survey I and Survey II. We also examined sources of terminology information used by nurses and found that reading of current nursing literature was generally the most dominant source of information. Another area explored was the similarities in familiarity with the terminologies between those nurses engaged in direct care and those engaged in informatics. In this area with the exception of the Perioperative Nursing Data Set, we noted that informatics nurses were significantly more familiar with the ANA-recognized terminologies than their counterparts engaged in direct clinical care.In this column, we will report on the Survey II participants' opinions about the education they received for using a given terminology. There were 567 participants who started this survey. As we reported in the first Survey II column, ninety-three percent of the respondents were females. The largest age group was 50-59 years (47%), and the second largest was 40-49 (20%). In general, the year in which respondents were first licensed corresponded with their ages (64% were first licensed before 1990). Participants were predominantly female and lived primarily in the United States (US) east of the Mississippi (Thede & Schwirian. 2012J.In Survey II, we used and a technique called branching in which the questions that a respondent saw on the screen were based on their answers to prior questions. For required questions, if an answer was not provided the participant was unable to continue the survey. The branching technique allowed participants who answered a given question negatively to not waste time with questions that were not applicable to them. Thus a no answer to a question, such as Have you ever used X terminology? took the participant to the question asking about the next terminology. Unfortunately, skipping a question was treated by the program as if the participant had answered yes. We remedied this in our report by only providing responses from those who answered yes to the determinant question and were thus qualified to answer more questions about a topic. Given that we did not want to have too many required questions, which might force an untruthful answer not only to that question, but also to subsequent questions, the only questions that required answer were questions asking if the respondent was familiar with a given terminology.The terminologies that were included in the survey are those that have been recognized by the ANA. Their acronyms and full names are listed in Figure 1 in the order that questions about a terminology were presented in the questionnaire. Of these terminologies, SNOMED, LOINC, and the ABC codes are interdisciplinary. LOINC is primarily concerned with lab results and assessment, and the ABC codes are a way for non-physicians to bill.The other terminologies are all nursing specific, that is, they were developed primarily for nursing. With the exception of NANDA, NIC, and NOC, the nursing-specific terminologies and SNOMED include labels and coding for the nursing entities of: nursing problems (diagnoses), interventions, and outcomes. Thus they can capture all three of these nursing entities. NANDA, NIC, and NOC, however, each capture only one of these entities. …