Overview
Australia’s adoption of a nationwide Standardised Nursing Terminology (SNT) system would enable nursing’s contribution to healthcare to be more visible, to generate more insights, leading to best practice and an increase in the body of nursing knowledge. The SNT would allow healthcare practitioners, regardless of their location or healthcare system, to understand exactly 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 and will help to highlight the full scope of nursing interventions, ensuring that all aspects of nursing care are recognised and valued. This would leverage health services’ digital capability to make nursing visible, demonstrating nurses’ significant contributions to health care.
Key recommendations
ACN advocates for adoption of SNT consistently across the health care environment, and:
- Promotes nurses as vital stakeholders in the planning, implementation, and frameworking of SNT across relevant Government bodies and associations, and embedding of SNT in the Australian nursing curriculum
- Supports 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
- Advocates for the development of 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 the delivery of healthcare
- Supports the research work being undertaken by the centre International Classification of Nursing Practice (ICNP) research and development established at the Australian Catholic University with support from Monash Health.
