Nursing Study Guide/List of Nursing Diagnosis

Words cannot be patented, but works under copyright do not belong here.

This is not a comprehensive list and the terms used here have not been exposed to vigorous scientific testing. These are simply some terms which emerged in the course of nursing employment, which may be helpful to students of nursing.

Several publishers have invested time and energy to quantify a propietary language. The International council of nurses has published a list of nursing classifications which has been accepted as an international scientific language by the World Health Organization. Mapping the ICN terminology to commercial languages is underway. Having said that, enrolled nurses need to use their powers of critical thinking to show an awareness of the underpinning principles behind informatics, regardless of source.

There are a range of nursing diagnosis in the academic nursing literature. Various standards exist for verification and validation for informatics purposes. Students are encouraged to decide for themselves what they consider to be useful definitions of international concern to nurses.


 * Worry - an emotional state linked to all body systems.
 * Maceration - having excessive fluid (specify where)
 * Dessication - insufficent fluid (specify where)
 * Somalgia - paroxysms of soreness or ache, variously described.
 * exposure to factors causing deteriorating condition (specify)
 * | Ineffective perception

Examples of nursing diagnosis which occur in the literature might include
 * Self Care Deficit
 * Impaired skin integrity
 * | impaired verbal communication
 * | Constipation
 * | Malnutrition

In practise, nursing diagnosis is given cursory treatment by some individual nurses. Some institutional health care approaches omit diagnosis altogether. It may not be worth students learning a particular version, when employers may prefer acuity scoring of their own design. Nursing diagnosis may be regarded by some practising nurses as overly academic, impractical, unwieldy or uneconomial. The topic of diagnosis does not appear in all nursing curricula. Nursing diagnosis is sometimes given little emphasis in training as only one of several possible nursing care planning approaches. The whole question of informatics is considered by some nurses as detracting from more important clinical issues.