NOW FOR AN ORIGINAL PAPER ASSIGNMENT:Assignment: Psychiatric Diagnoses

Improved communication with other nurses, health care professionals, and administrators of the institutions in which nurses work is a key benefit of using a standardized nursing language. ICD-10 and DSM-IV are coded by a system of numbers for input into computers. The IDC-10 is a coding system used mainly for billing purposes by organizations and practitioners while the DSM-IV is a categorization system for psychiatric diagnoses. The DSM-IV categories have an ICD-10 counterpart code that is used for billing purposes.

Nurses lacked a standardized language to communicate their practice until the North American Nursing Diagnosis (NANDA), was introduced in 1973. Since then several more languages have been developed. The Nursing Minimum Data Set (NMDS) was developed in 1988 (Prophet & Delaney, 1998) followed by the Nursing Management Minimum Data Set (NMMDS) in 1989 (Huber, Schumacher, & Delaney, 1997). The Clinical Care Classification (CCC) was developed in 1991 for use in hospitals, ambulatory care clinics, and other settings (Saba, 2003). The standardized language developed for home, public health, and school health is the Omaha System (The Omaha System, 2004). The Nursing Intervention Classification (NIC) was published for the first time in 1992; it is currently in its fourth edition (McCloskey-Dochterman & Bulachek, 2004). The most current edition of the Nursing Outcomes Classification system (NOC), as of this writing, is the third edition published in 2004 (Moorhead, Johnson, & Maas, 2004). Both are used across a number of settings.

Use of standardized nursing languages promises to enhance communication of nursing care nationally and internationally. This is important because it will alert nurses to helpful interventions that may not be in current use in their areas. Two presentations at the NANDA, NIC, NOC 2004 Conference illustrated the use of a standardized nursing language in other countries (Baena de Morales Lopes, Jose dos Reis, & Higa, 2004; Lee, 2004). Lee (2004) used 360 nurse experts in quality assurance to identify five patient outcomes from the NOC (Johnson, Maas, & Moorhead, 2000) criteria to evaluate the quality of nursing care in Korean hospitals. The five NOC outcomes selected by the nurse experts as standards to evaluate the quality of care were vital signs status; knowledge: infection control; pain control behavior; safety behavior: fall prevention; and infection status.