Standardized Coding Systems and Nursing Essay

Each standardized nursing language is designed for use in a number of clinical settings, including home care, ambulatory care, and inpatient treatment, with certain languages providing decided advantages within particular circumstances. Although it is true that "improved communication with other nurses, health care professionals, and administrators of the institutions in which nurses work is a key benefit of using a standardized nursing language" (Rutherford, 2008), the proliferation of several nursing languages throughout the years has inevitably resulted in discrepancies, wherein the personal preferences of nurses, the policy of a hospital's corporate ownership, or other factors determine when, where, and why a specific language is used.

To address the growing concern over the inability of nurse's to communicate through a single standardized language system, the International Council of Nurses (ICN) commissioned a comprehensive study which resulted in the International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP) being selected as the most advantageous option. For primary care nurses tasked primarily with patient care, the ICNP allows for narrative-form descriptions of patient interactions, along with binary recordings of test results and pharmaceutical interactions, because it has been established that "other disciplines with interdependent functions allow the production of documentation that requires those departments (such as the pharmacy or the blood bank) and nurses to complete, such as when nurses are involved in administering or assisting" (Cho & Park, 2006).Due to its inclusiveness and adaptability, both key functions of any viable language, the ICNP is clearly the preferable standardized nursing language in terms of efficacy and efficiency.

References

Cho, I., & Park, H. (2006). Evaluation of the expressiveness of an ICNP-based nursing data dictionary in a computerized nursing record system. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 13(4), 456-464. Retrieved from http://171.67.114.118/content/13/4/456.full

Rutherford, M. (2008). Standardized nursing language: What does it mean for nursing practice?. OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 13(1), 57-69. Retrieved from http://www.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ThePracticeofProfessionalNursing/H….....