Describing the sublanguage of wound care in an adult ICU

Comprehensive wound documentation is an important tool in evaluating and planning patient care. The sublanguage used in ICUs may affect negatively to the wound care and thus to the healing process. We made a quantitative content analysis of nursing documentation of cardiac surgery adult patients (n=60) who had stayed over four days in the ICU. The sublanguage used in nursing documentation of wounds and ulcers in the ICU was unstructured with many words of colloquial language, misspellings and abbreviations. The documentation did not cover all aspects of proper wound care. The information technology could be helpful for nurses to document right things with plain language.