Nursing Interventions

Definition

A nursing intervention is defined as a single nursing action - treatment, procedure or activity - designed to achieve an outcome to a diagnosis, nursing or medical, for which the nurse is accountable (Saba, 2007).
Patient services are usually initiated as medical orders by a referring physician and reviewed by the admitting nurse. As part of the admission assessment the primary nurse also determines the nursing orders based on the signs and symptoms, diagnoses, and expected outcomes/goals; and together, form the plan of care that requires the nursing interventions (Campbell, 1990; Saba, 2007).

Description

The CCC of Nursing Interventions was derived from the 73,529 nursing interventions and/or services narrative statements collected for the entire episode of care. Many of the statements were not always mutually exclusive and others were determined to represent a more precise description of a given intervention. Based on statistical analyses and clinical judgement the classification was designed and developed with major categories for the interventions that encompassed multiple tasks and sub-categories for the specific atomic-level tasks. Additionally, the nursing service statements were found to contain two aspects: (a) the nursing service, treatment, and/or intervention and (b) an action that qualified the action type of intervention. Both aspects were considered essential for providing patient care and used to create the terminology.

Action Type

The CCC of Nursing Interventions were expanded by four Action Type qualifiers that depicted four different action type of the core intervention. By using a qualifier a nursing intervention is more precise and provides another facet of the care process that can be expressed in time and used to determine resources and cost. The qualifiers add another dimension to the coding process making it easier to code, classify, and analyze each intervention.