[Nursing diagnosis. Keys for its development]

The authors carried out a study of the taxonomy used at the 1990 NANDA Conference. A few of the authors findings were some diagnostic labels were found to be imprecise; some of the diagnostic labels relate to causes which would only allow nurses to work in collaboration with other medical team professionals; other labels described symptoms which were hard to define objectively or were non-verifiable, imprecise and vague defining the problem. As a conclusion to this study, the authors contend that in order to develop nursing diagnostics it is necessary to validate the existing labels, develop new labels, make diagnostic tests serve as an appraisal and detection instrument, and to develop the critical symptoms necessary for identifying diagnostic labels. This study is based on a paper presented at the "First International Symposium on Nursin Diagnostics" which was celebrated in Barcelona.