The Benefits of the PNDS
Clinicians, managers, educators and researchers are currently utilizing PNDS in a variety of real world, perioperative clinical applications and settings. There are a number of benefits of the PNDS that apply to each sector, and as the knowledge and understanding of its values increases, so does the commitment its use in health care systems.
Benefits for Clinicians
Currently, clinical documentation standards are determined by the clinicians in each specific facility. This makes it extremely difficult to obtain comparable data for similar clinical situations or events. Structured or standardized vocabularies provide uniformity to the language used by clinicians to develop care plans and document nursing care.
The PNDS provides wording and definitions for nursing diagnostics, interventions and outcomes, thus furnishing clinicians with the same terms to describe patient care.
Standardization of terms in all forms of documentation and across clinical situations and settings allows data to be collected in a uniform way.
It also provides nursing with the best knowledgebase possible to:
- Make clinical decisions
- Measure their contributions
- Confirm, define and improve the quality of nursing care
- Establish best practices
Benefits for Managers
Managers need reliable and valid data to make informed decisions regarding staffing, purchasing, and scheduling. The PNDS provides both the terms and definitions required to establish databases that support:
- The evaluation of resource utilization
- Comparisons across clinical situations and institutions
- Comparisons of clinical data from a large number of patients, which permit managers to measure, monitor, and evaluate the quality of care or address risk management
Other ways managers can benefit from and use the PNDS include:
- Develop nurse position descriptions, position accountabilities, evaluations forms, and nurse competency statements
- Use as a framework for establishing policies and procedures related to clinical skills
- Provide a basis for developing practice guidelines, critical pathways, and best practices
Benefits for Educators
The benefits the PNDS brings to educators are numerous, from identify the essential content for educational and orientation programs to helping them to teach students and new personnel.
In chapter four of the 2nd Edition of the Perioperative Nursing Data Set (which can be purchased online at the AORN Perioperative Bookstore), the reader can learn how one nursing professor has used the PNDS to facilitate student learning about the area and management of patients before, during and after surgery. Or, how another educator has integrated the PNDS into the perioperative internship program for novice and experienced nurses in the OR.
Benefits for Researchers
A tremendous resource for answering many nursing research questions lies within the majority of nursing information systems. Unfortunately, most of that data is not retrievable in a useful format. Plus, the lack of consistent documentation standards and the limited use of structured vocabulary have ensured that data sets cannot be grouped or compared across settings.
The PNDS, when fully implemented, guides research agenda for a perioperative setting and provides a framework to:
- Identify which interventions contribute to specific outcomes
- Allow for better data collection and the ability to compare data across clinical situations and settings
- Support the ability to create a data repository and aggregate data sources
- Provide large populations of surgical patients from which to explore data
- Provide outcome statements that are explicit, clearly defined, observable, and measurable