An international methodology to describe clinical nursing phenomena: a team approach

The development of a structured and standardized clinical language for nurs ing is of major importance to the profession for both practice and science. This paper describes a methodological approach which has been developed fo r the refinement and extension of the NANDA taxonomy in the Nursing Diagnos is Extension and Classification (NDEC) project. The paper proposes that thi s method could be used by nurses in all countries to facilitate the identif ication, development and validation of terms and labels which can be incorp orated into each country's own emerging data systems, translated and cross mapped between systems, and eventually incorporated into international data sets. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.