Developing the nursing process can mean many things, how does one go about nursing in general, how does one write about nursing, how does one think about nursing, and most of all what is a nursing process? And why is a nursing process such an important issue? But most of all, in the technological age, how can a universal language be developed so that the facts can be easily interpreted by anyone needing the information?
The latter, how can a universal technological language be developed so that all can partake of the information without doubts, queries, and confusion, will be considered in this article. According to research information, a standard already exists that considers descriptive words that are uniform in meaning and can easily be translated into international languages.
International Standards Organization (ISO) is an impressive group that sets out to create standards worldwide. The American National Standards Organization is one of the members of this quality control organization. What part does ISO play in standardizing of the nursing process? It has developed and is responsible for maintaining Health Level Seven, a universal standard for data integration that concern and support patient care, management, delivery, and whatever else goes into health care, nationally and internationally.
How does it work? It designates words as specific meanings relative to nursing care. The model it uses is the HL7 RIM, and the language is Unified Modeling Language (UML). Classes are then selected and then are sub-divided into various other categories. As an example, words have specific meanings. Words becomes classes as top levels entries, and these will have subtitles.
Their intention is to collect representative, all inclusive words that acts as top classes, and then to subdivide them into other descriptive words and to set up a hierarchy of information technology that will allow for easy interpretation of how to care for patients. Main topics of HL7 are not unlike any other type care plans developed by nursing organizations. They have classes of containment data such a “data collection and assessment, diagnosis, identification of goals, planning of interventions, Implementation of treatment and care, evaluation.”
At first an uninitiated person might wonder at why all this technicality is necessary. Why not let each area, each situation take care of its own method of dispersing nursing information? Why bother with all this backroom stuff known only by the professionals involved?
The answer to that is simple. There must be set rules on how to treat patients. These rules must be the same for all the medical communities all over the world. How else can one from a foreign country, schooled and taught there go to another country and still practice their chosen profession?
And these set rules of development of nursing – any other meaningful medical profession and others – are now becoming even more necessary if computerized medicine is to become universally acceptable. Not only universally acceptable, but they are needed guidelines by which medical information technologist can begin their work.
Therefore the nursing process is developed in such a way that those involved in nursing have no problem understanding what is meant by each entry into medical and nursing data. A nurse, because such a model of description and pertinent data has been uniformly correlated and put into place, can walk into any nursing situation and immediately assess, implement and take charge of whatever duty is assigned, or is seen as an acute need.
