[Standards in quality assurance in nursing]

The purpose of this article is to describe what kind of nursing standards have been written in Finland. The quality assurance process of nursing includes setting of nursing standards. They express the desired quality level of nursing. They would also guide the practice of nursing. The analysed nursing standards were collected from five university hospitals, 15 central hospitals and nine health centers. The standards were collected with the questionnaire studying the present situation of quality assurance of nursing in Finland. The total number of analysed nursing standards was 190. According to the results the standards were mostly set to evaluate and characterize the quality of nursing of the certain patient group (e.g. new born child, dying patient, cancer patient in chemotherapy) and to evaluate the realization of nursing principles. Safety and individuality of nursing and independence and autonomy of patient were the most often appeared nursing principles in the analysed standards. The standards were written in passive and the level of quality was the ideal optimum. The nursing standards were expressed often abstractively and in such a form that the measurement and evaluation of reached level of the standard is a very difficult task.