Nursing-sensitive outcome reliability testing in a tertiary care setting.

Purpose: To describe nursing outcomes classification (NOC) that are most relevant for, specialty acute care nursing practice, and to assess the adequacy of measures.

Methods: Data were collected on 434 patients during the 14-month data collection period at a tertiary care center: cardiac surgery intensive care (n = 76), cardiac transplant unit (n = 153), and medical unit (n = 205).

Findings: Thirty-six NOC outcomes were used 10 or more times during the study. Of those, 16 had an inter-rater reliability of 75% or higher.

Conclusions: NOC outcomes show promise for accurately documenting the effectiveness of nursing interventions. Further study is needed to develop meaningful analysis of the documented NOC outcomes and efficiently integrate NOC into electronic documentation systems.

Practice Implications: Increased familiarity with NOC allowed nursing staff to determine which outcomes comprise core nursing-sensitive outcomes for their clinical setting.