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devote some time to lobbying the producers of the offending form to reconsider their categorization of people. The NIC group has wrestled with the same strategic choice. It must fit its classification system into the Procrustean bed of all the other classification systems with which it must articulate in any given medical setting. Only thus may it come to form a part of a given organization's potential memory. The other choice is to reject the ways in which memory is structured in the organizations with which they are dealing. |
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Let us look first at the argument for including NIC within the potential memory framework of the hospital. The nursing team argues that NIC has to respond to multiple important agendas simultaneously. Consider the following litany of needs for a standard vocabulary of nursing practice: |
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It is essential to develop a standardized nomenclature of nursing diagnoses to name without ambiguity those conditions in clients that nurses identify and treat without prescription from other disciplines; such identification is not possible without agreement as to the meaning of terms. Professional standards review boards require discipline-specific accountability; some urgency in developing a discipline-specific nomenclature is provided by the impending National Health Insurance legislation, since demands for accountability are likely both to increase and become more stringent following passage of the legislation. Adoption of a standardized nomenclature of nursing diagnoses may also alleviate problems in communication between nurses and members of other disciplines, and improvement in interdisciplinary communication can only lead to improvement in patient care. Standardization of the nomenclature of nursing diagnoses will promote health care delivery by identifying, for legal and reimbursement purposes, the evaluation of the quality of care provided by nurses; facilitate the development of a taxonomy of nursing diagnoses; provide the element for storage and retrieval of nursing data; and facilitate the teaching of nursing by providing content areas that are discrete, inclusive, logical, and consistent. (Castles 1981, 38) |
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We have cited this passage at length since it incorporates most of the motivations for the development of NIC. The development of a new information infrastructure for nursing, heralded in this passage, will make nursing more "memorable." It will also lead to a clearance of past nursing knowledgehenceforth prescientificfrom the textbooks, it will lead to changes in the practice of nursing (a redefinition of disciplinary boundaries), and to a shaping of nursing so that future practice converges on potential memory. |
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Many nurses and nursing informaticians are concerned that the profession itself may have to change too much to meet the |
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