NOW FOR AN ORIGINAL PAPER ASSIGNMENT:Case Studie: The NOC System

The already-mentioned NOC system outcomes are nurse-sensitive outcomes, which means the they are sensitive to those interventions performed primarily by nurses (Moorehead et al., 2004). Because the NOC system measures nursing outcomes on a numerical rating scale, it, too, facilitates the benchmarking of nursing practices across facilities, regions, and countries. The current edition of NOC (2004), which assesses the impact of nursing care on the individual, the family, and the community, contains 330 outcomes classified in seven domains and 29 classes.

A NOC outcome common to nurses who work with elderly patients who have a swallowing impairment is aspiration prevention (Moorehead et al., 2004). Patient behaviors indicating this outcome include identifying risk factors, avoiding risk factors, positioning self upright for eating/drinking, and choosing liquids and foods of proper consistency. Rating each indictor on a scale from one (never demonstrated) to five (consistently demonstrated) helps track risk for aspiration in individuals at various stages of illness during the hospitalization. It also gives an indication of a person’s compliance in following the prevention measures and the nurse’s success in patient education.

A NOC outcome that labor nurses frequently use is pain level (Moorehead et al., 2004), related to the severity and intensity of pain a woman experiences with contractions. The pain level can be assessed before and after the use of coping techniques such as breathing exercises and repositioning. Indicators for this specific pain outcome include: reported pain, moaning and crying, facial expressions of pain, restlessness, narrowed focus, respiratory rate, pulse rate, blood pressure, and perspiration (p. 421) and are rated on a scale from severe ( 1) to none ( 5). The difference between the numerical ratings for each indicator before and after use of the coping techniques estimates the success of the intervention in achieving the outcome of reducing the pain level for laboring mothers.

Greater Adherence to Standards of Care

Related to the quality of nursing care is the level of adherence to the standards of care for a given patient population. The NIC and NOC standardized nursing language systems are based on both the input of expert nurses and the standards of care from various professional organizations.