An international methodology to describe clinical nursing phenomena: a team approach.

The development of a structured and standardized clinical language for nursing is of major importance to the profession for both practice and science. This paper describes a methodological approach which has been developed for the refinement and extension of the NANDA taxonomy in the Nursing Diagnosis Extension and Classification (NDEC) project. The paper proposes that this method could be used by nurses in all countries to facilitate the identification, development and validation of terms and labels which can be incorporated into each country's own emerging data systems, translated and cross mapped between systems, and eventually incorporated into international data sets.