On the development and classification of diagnoses

Nurses, as noted earlier, always have and are now using the five steps of the diagnosis process. This utilization is a valuable and essential element of a profession. On the other hand, conceptual analysis of the process suggests that all ten steps are necessary conditions for a natural history of nursing. Such a natural history would constitute a taxonomy of nursing diagnoses and would identify and codify essential concerns and associated nomenclatures which have been agreed upon by members of the profession. In turn, such an agreement would lead to a common universe of discourse for the clinicians, the students, the teachers, the administrators, and the researchers in nursing. A workable taxonomy would provide potential points of reference, purpose, and direction and would facilitate communication and collaboration in nursing practice, nursing education, and nursing research. Such a taxonomy would constitute a systematic ordering of the unique body of knowledge of nursing and would provide a foundation of level-one theory. On this basis could be built higher-level theories that are grounded in observable phenomena. This development, in turn, would create a bridge across the knowledge-practice gap and would allow more effective application of scientific knowledge to specific clinical patient-care and nursing problems. A workable taxonomy of nursing diagnoses would articulate areas of unique concern to nurses and nursing and would allow more unequivocal communication of the focus, limits, and nature of the realm of nursing to other professions, third-party payers, governmental agencies, and the public. Without the development of such a framework, nursing research will continue to flounder, nursing education will continue to lack articulation of ordered body of knowledge of nursing concerns and related cognitive and other competencies, and nursing practice will continue to drift toward the use of medical terminology and to focus on dependent and technical nursing functions and the extension of the role of the nurse in the domain of medicine. In short, the lack of a sound taxonomy of nursing diagnoses endangers the realm of independent functions of nursing--its care, comfort, and compassion for the person who suffers from illness, and its focus on increased patient self-help ability, self-determination, and health promotion.