The Australian College of Nursing (ACN) has developed a new Position Statement on Standardised Nursing Terminology (SNT).
ACN is advocating for SNT systems that enable nursing's contribution to health care to be more visible, and to generate new insights, leading to best practice and increasing the body of nursing knowledge.
This Position Statement provides the nursing profession with an understanding of the benefits of national SNT adoption and the use of SNT to enable comprehensive nursing data collection and analysis.
It notes that the adoption of SNT alone is not enough to create clinical decision support or generative artificial intelligence but is required to achieve and optimise these.
ACN is committed to making nursing visible by adopting a global standard language within a suitably structured ecosystem to:
- Demonstrate the value of nurses and midwives' contribution to health care.
- Manage nursing resources.
- Support data analytics by making use of quality-coded nursing data.
- Support continuity of care across health services
- Enhance patient outcomes within and between health services.
- Facilitate interoperability between organisations.
- Develop decision support algorithms and generative artificial intelligence protocols.
ACN Interim CEO, Emeritus Professor Leanne Boyd FACN, said that advances in digital platforms mean that Australia is now well placed to adopt SNT as a national digital standard for nursing.
"With the advent of generative artificial intelligence, it is critical that we now adopt SNT as a data enabler," Professor Boyd said.
"The adoption of a nationwide SNT would allow healthcare practitioners, regardless of their location or healthcare system, to understand precisely what is meant when discussing interventions, promoting clear communication, and reducing the risk of misunderstanding or errors in patient care.
"SNT also acknowledges the holistic approach nurses take in their practice.
"It will help to highlight the full scope of nursing interventions, ensuring that all aspects of nursing care are recognised and valued, leveraging health services' digital capability to make nursing visible.
"Standardised terminology facilitates the comparison of nursing practices and outcomes across different healthcare facilities.
"This enables benchmarking for quality improvement initiatives and nursing research, and development of the domain of nursing practice and nursing knowledge.
"Importantly, SNT supports transferable knowledge when nurses move to different healthcare settings."
ACN is calling for the adoption of SNT consistently across the healthcare environment, which involves:
- The adoption and use of the International Classification of Nursing Practice (ICNP) nationwide as the preferred Australian SNT.
- Ongoing research and development of ICNP in Australia.
- Promoting the use of SNT in Nursing and Midwifery education programs.
- Supporting the ethical collection and use of nursing analytics from SNT to identify themes, trends, and gaps for innovation and economic evaluation to improve professional and patient outcomes and to evaluate nursing interventions.
- Nurses and midwives to be involved in all steps in the process of contributing to the development of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) profiles and clinical models, which can actively provide interoperability of nursing information.
- Developing standard data value sets that best reflect nursing's contribution to health and are suitable for every nursing specialty to support the national measurement of the value of nursing's contribution to healthcare delivery.
- Supporting the research work being undertaken by the collaborative ICN accredited centre for ICNP research and development established at the Australian Catholic University with support from Monash Health.
- Establishing a national committee to coordinate the development, implementation, ongoing research, investment, and economic evaluation of national data sets.
Professor Boyd said that ACN would work with the relevant Government bodies and associations to implement a national standard nursing terminology, which will encompass a governance framework, guidelines, structures, and standards for consistency.
The ACN Position Statement on Standardised Nursing Terminology is at https://www.acn.edu.au/advocacy-policy/position-statement-standardised-nursing-terminology-enabling-comprehensive-nursing-data-and-analysis
