Nursing terminology: a comparison of the ICNP and the nursing intervention lexicon and taxonomy

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of nursing terminology work done to date and to compare the labels and subsumed terms of the recent alpha version of the International Classification of Nursing Practice (ICNP) with the verb terms (n = 147) of the interventions in a dataset of interventions (n = 7292) categorized using the Nursing Intervention Lexicon and Taxonomy (NILT). Two estimates were used to evaluate the adequacy of the ICNP terms for representing intervention terminology. Term matches were done using the NILT categories most similar to the ICNP action types. The ICNP action type 'observing' (and its subsumed terms) was best, accounting for 20% of the NILT verbs. The ICNP label 'observing' (and its subsumed terms) ranked first in accounting for 69% of the interventions in the NILT categories (CND & CV). The remaining action types had many fewer matches for the verbs and interventions in the NILT dataset. Thus it is possible to conclude that a relatively small subset of the verb terms, and interventions in a dataset of natural language interventions categorized using NILT have been captured by the INCP alpha version of Axis A.