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responsibility for the cure of diseases, the nurses have to measure more the speed of the cure and the quality of life during the hospital visit and after release (for example, whether patients understood how to deal with the consequences of their bypass surgery). |
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The three systems could work together in the following fashion. One could perform studies over a set of hospitals employing the three schemes to check if a given category of patient responded well to a given category of nursing intervention. Rather than this comparative work being done anecdotally, as in the past through the accumulation of experience, it could be done scientifically through the conduct of experiments. The Iowa Intervention Project made up a jingle: NANDA, NIC, and NOC to the tune of ''Hickory, Dickory, Dock" to stress this interrelationship of the three schemes. |
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The second argument for classifying nursing interventions was that it was a key strategy for defending the professional autonomy of nursing. The Iowa intervention team is aware of the literature on professionalizationnotably Schön (1983)and of the force of having an accepted body of scientific knowledge as their domain. Andrew Abbott (1988), taking as his central case the professionalization of medicine, makes this one of the key attributes of a profession. |
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The third argument was that nursing, alongside other medical professions, was moving into the new world of computers and networked information technology. As the representational medium changed, it was important to be able to talk about nursing in a language that computers could understand, else nursing work would not be represented at all in the future. It would risk being even further marginalized than it is at present. |
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The empirical material for this analysis consists of all the minutes of NIC team meetings and publications of the NIC group since 1987; eighteen open-ended, in-depth interviews with principal investigators, coinvestigators, and research associates; and observations of team meetings. |
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Infrastructure and Organizations |
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There is no simple way to tell the story of the complex theoretical and practical work that goes into the development of an information infrastructure. Star and Ruhleder (1996) argue that an infrastructure has several key properties. Their relationship to NIC is detailed here: |
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