SOUTH-DAKOTA STATEWIDE NURSING MINIMUM DATA SET PROJECT

The elements of the Nursing Minimum Data Set (NMDS) were collected man ually from 188 medical records in eight acute care facilities. These e ight facilities represent 54 per cent of the beds in South Dakota. The purpose of the study was to describe discharge destination, nursing d iagnoses, nursing interventions, and nursing resource utilization for patients with fractured femur with pinning. The sample was primarily f emale (69.1 per cent), with a mean age of 78.5 years. Most (84.0 per c ent) patients were transferred to another facility, with 46.2 per cent going to extended care facilities, The most frequent nursing diagnose s were comfort (89.9 per cent) and physical mobility (59.6 per cent), Interventions were classified using the 16-category classification sch eme developed by Werley and Lang. The most frequently recorded types o f interventions were in the category of monitoring and/or surveillance (16.7 per cent of 7,555 interventions), whereas emotional support and /or counseling was much less frequent (3.0 per cent of 7,555). Dischar ge planning was the most frequent nursing intervention in the category of coordination and collaboration of care (54.8 per cent of 188 patie nts), Documentation systems have been structured to accommodate techni cal tasks on flow sheets, for example. Nursing resource utilization wa s the most difficult, and also presently the least meaningful, NMDS el ement to collect because each facility has different staffing, differe nt patient classification systems, and no prescribed method for collec ting these data, Manual data collection is time-consuming and expensiv e and therefore not recommended.