[Classification of written nursing records in the intensive care unit of the Alicante General Hospital]

During the last few years the need to implant written Nursing registers has been transferred from Schools to the different official organisms. The Servicio Valenciano de Salud took it as an aim to achieve by 1992 and we also know the Insalud and other autonomic sanitary organisms have shown their interest for the creation of such registers, and there is also a general consensus at a theoretical level of the requirements they ought to fulfill. With this work we plan to: first, know the percentage of nurses who, in our unit, write intershift reports. Second, know the kind of event or activities which we write down in these intershift reports, and last, classify the contents of such registers. To do this we analyse 113 intershift reports, randomly chosen and without previous notice to the unit staff, of the total number of available intershift reports in different periods of time between January and November 1993. A content analysis was performed with a result of 13 categories. The later classification of the contents of the registers in this category item, by equivalence among judges, indicated the high reliability of the process. The Agreement Degree obtained was 98.08% for all the categories. The results obtained indicate: 1) only medical diagnosis are used, not nursing ones 2) the events written down are of a biomedical type 3) information from graphics is repeated 4) the percentage of written intershift reports was 94.95%. Several questions arisen from the results obtained and the bibliography used for this research are revised.