Locating nursing classification schemes within health information strategies for New Zealand.

The potential to use classification schemes to describe and measure nursing in a country that has previously not used them as a part of practice is fraught with issues. Such is the case for New Zealand. Without nursing specific classification scheme use in the information systems of day to day function, nursing cannot validate what it does and the difference it makes to health outcomes for New Zealanders. The local use of valid and reliable classification schemes as tools to capture locally generated data that is able to be used as quality data needs to be considered alongside the national use of reliable clinical reference tools that are consistent with international standards. This may make the difference to the potential for significant contribution of nursing practice specific data to health information collections in preference to a 'one fits all' approach to user interface nursing classification scheme adoption at a local level. Tensions between a top-down approach and a locally based bottoms-up practice based approach and associated issues provide the core to this paper.

Toward standardising nursing language in New Zealand.

Historically nursing in New Zealand has not used any standardised means to classify practice. In a rapidly developing health information technology (IT) sector this raises serious questions about documentation processes, information management and knowledge development nursing. Recently the Nursing Council of New Zealand has redefined nursing practice, included documentation skills and information management as core competencies within the Registered Nurse and Nurse Practitioner Scopes of Practice (2004) and included information technology as core curricula content within pre-registration nursing programmes. This opinion paper will argue that continued lack of description and analysis of nursing practice in this country will enhance nursing vulnerability. It will background the extent of this issue and outline a project that aims to explore the contextual issues, test a language embedded with a clinical information system and develop a procedural framework to guide the implementation of automated means to describe, compare, examine and analyse nursing practices and processes within New Zealand. The framework will take into account the uniqueness of New Zealand nursing located within international positions and will be a first step toward using a standardised professional language embedded in clinical information systems.