[Nursing care evaluation, how to measure it and why?]

Quality of care assessment is based on three main prerequisites: to describe precisely patients or case-mix, to measure the level of care, to evaluate the outcomes and finally to consider the relationships between these parameters. Indicators to measure the level of nurses' workload have been developed from different concepts and methodologies: The range of nurses' activities is very wide, such as cares achieved in the presence of patient, cares achieved after medical prescription or specific nurse cares, administrative tasks, research activities, etc. Indicators may take into account a more or less important part of this field, but most of them are usually focused on patient's care. The value of each parameter may be a calculated coefficient or a time unit. If one considers the time as the best unit to measure the intensity of work, it is also an underlying concept to differentiate the actual time, obtained by timing, from the required time, necessary to achieve correctly the action. In the same way, required cares are also the best to consider. Indeed measuring required time for required cares is necessary to reach quality aim. The nurses' workload may be directly calculated with a specific indicator or indirectly estimated from a severity or disability scoring system. The selection of the indicator depends of the purpose of the evaluation process. If the question is to improve and develop quality of care and professional practices, the indicator has to take into account the required cares. The PRN system (Project de Recherche en Nursing) developed in Canada is probably the reference indicator. However this score is complex and cannot be daily used.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)