Congruence of terms between lists of problems and the ICNP--Alpha Version. International Classification for Nursing Practice.

The International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP)--Alpha Version, is the first rendition of the International Council of Nurses (ICN) efforts to develop a standardized international nursing language system. This system has three principal components: nursing phenomena; nursing actions; and nursing outcomes. This article describes a study of agreements between terms used by nurses of the intensive care unit at the Hospital of the University of Sao Paulo, to designate patients' nursing problems and the terms proposed by the ICNP--Alpha Version. The records of 59 interned patients, admitted to the intensive therapy unit, were analysed for nursing problems. Of 336 problem categories listed by the nurses, 153 (45.5%) corresponded to the ICNP terms. The 183 categories of problems that did not correspond to the ICNP terms were categorized by the authors as the following: medical diagnoses (37.2%); signs (28.4%); interventions (26.2%); and historical data (8.2%). These results show that there may be no agreement between the concept of nursing phenomena for the ICNP and of nursing problems for the nurses whose records were analysed. Considering that medical diagnoses, intervention and historical data could not be accepted as nursing phenomena for the ICNP, the agreement is potentially higher than 45.5%.