Discussion: Impact of Standardized Terminologies on Practice (graded)
How would a standardized terminology (of your choice) directly impact your nursing
practice? Provide a rationale and one example.
The course outcome guiding our discussion this week is:
CO 4: Assess the value of standardized terminologies in supporting nursing in all four
practice settings. (POs 5, 11)
Consider how that choice of Standardized Terminology (in TD1) directly impacts your
practice.
Any standard terminology helps in the information exchange at the local, national, and
international levels. In this Discussion thread, apply the concept of a standard terminology
to your own practice. Using the standardized terminologies we identified from the first
discussion, which one did you choose to adopt? As my practice area is education, I would
be very likely to adopt the NANDA Diagnoses and Classifications as they provide the
framework for clinical care plans and concept map development. Many of you may utilize
this classification system in your clinical practice area as well.
Provide a rationale and support for your response and at least one example. Also,
think in the back of your minds, how standardization would help with the output of
information of an Electronic Health Record.
Remember that the impact on practice could be patient outcome related, or perhaps
it might be related to nursing workflow, communication, cost, nurse satisfaction, retention,
and/or training, etc. I am very much interested in your thoughts and applications on this
topic. As you write your posts, please remember to include evidence based research,
scholarly evidence, and/or a citation from your textbook.
Impact of Standardized Terminologies in Practice
The field of nursing has always faced a significant challenge on how to differentiate the
contributions of nursing to patient care from those of medicine. As a result, practicing nurses
have been challenged to understand why it is necessary to document patient care using
standardized languages, especially now as several institutions are shifting toward using
electronic documentation (ED). Actually, it has been proven that it is not possible for any
organization to implement ED use without having a clear standardized language to illustrate the
key elements of the care process (Tastan et al., 2014).
According to Brown et al. (2013), standardize terminologies have played an integral role
in the field of nursing. For instance, they have been used to particularly to identify the impact of
nursing in patient care and establish the most suitable way of incorporating components of
STANDARDIZED TERMINOLOGIES
nursing care into the electronic health record (EHR). It has also been used to identify the best
documentation that illustrates and assesses patient care quality.
Standardized terminologies also have several essential and necessary advantages. For
instance, they aid in improving communication among healthcare providers, they promote
visibility of nursing intervention and the consequential outcomes of patients (Matney and
Lundberg, 2013). Moreover standardized terminologies improve the quality of patient care,
promote close adherence to standard practice procedures, and further the agenda of nursing
research by producing data about patient care in a manner that is consistent (Schwirian, 2013).
The standardized terminology of my choice is NOC. This is a significant standardized
terminology in my practice because it helps me determine interventions and outcomes among
children with acute abdomen in my area of practice. NOC aids me to recognize these children’s
chief complaints, and the most frequent etiology. This terminology is also essential in describing
the decrease factors such as symptom persistence, symptom intensity, symptom frequency as
well as the associated acute abdomen discomfort.
STANDARDIZED TERMINOLOGIES
References
Brown, G. D., Patrick, T. B., & Pasupathy, K. S. (Eds.). (2013). Health informatics: a systems
perspective.
Matney, S. & Lundberg, C. (2013). The role of standardized terminology and language in
informatics. In T. Hebda & P. Czar (Eds.), Handbook of informatics for nurses and
healthcare professionals (5th ed.) (pp. 295–323). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-
Hall, Inc.
Schwirian, P. W. (2013). Informatics and the future of nursing: Harnessing the power of
standardized nursing terminology. Bulletin of the Association for Information Science
and Technology, 39(5), 20–24.
STANDARDIZED TERMINOLOGIES
Tastan, S., Linch, G. C., Keenan, G. M., Stifter, J., McKinney, D., Fahey, L., … & Wilkie, D. J.
(2014). Evidence for the existing American Nurses Association-recognized standardized
nursing terminologies: A systematic review. International journal of nursing
studies, 51(8), 1160-1170.