[Nursing terminology standards in taiwan: current situation and trends]

Nursing terminology standards are critical to effective nursing communications in clinical practice, education, administration, and research. Recently, the national Department of Health has promoted implementation of a standardized Taiwan electronic medical record template (TMT). The TMT provides a specific need for nursing terminology standards used in all medical facilities. In this article, we survey and compare the development of nursing terminology standards in Taiwan with that of the international community. The two principal recommendations made in this paper include 1) link Taiwan terminology standards at the education and research levels to international standards and 2) integrate localized nursing terminology into Taiwan terminology standards for use in nursing information system relational databases and electronic nursing records. We hope that the government, medical institutions, and academic organizations will pay greater attention to the standardization of local nursing terminology in order to advance nursing quality in Taiwan.