An International Classification for Nursing Practice

The particular contribution of this paper to the Workshop is to offer a global perspective on a shared problem. It is a cruel paradox that while we “know” that nursing is universal because the human needs that it exists to meet are universal, we have at present no empirical means of comparing nursing practice across countries, or even across clinical settings or client groups within a country. We do not yet have terms which are precisely defined or universally agreed in any one language, let alone across languages, in which to express what Florence Nightingale1 once called “the elements of nursing”: that is, what nurses do, in response to what sorts of problems, with what sorts of effects.