Criteria for assessment of nausea, vomiting, and retching.

Purpose/objectives: To promote accurate patient assessment, effective patient teaching, and useful research design and outcomes by defining the concepts of nausea, vomiting, and retching; to review the usefulness of self-care guides in assessing the patient's symptom experience.

Data Sources: Journal articles, the author's clinical experiences.

Data Synthesis: The concepts of nausea, vomiting, and retching may be difficult for patients to describe and for nurses to assess. Measurement and assessment methods that accurately reflect the patient's experience are critical.

Conclusion: Management of the individual symptoms of nausea, vomiting, and retching requires expert ongoing assessment of the patient's symptom experience that extends beyond the clinic or hospital visit. Information about symptom occurrence and distress and about self-care strategies used can play a crucial role in the identification, prevention, and management of symptom experience, with the good of improving the patient's quality of life.

Implications For Nursing Practice: Effective management of the patient's symptom experience depends on the oncology nurse's ability to differentiate occurrence and distress of the individual symptoms and to implement current knowledge not only of chemotherapy, antiemetic drugs, and nonpharmacologic interventions but of unerring ongoing assessments that lead to cost-effective, clinically useful patient outcomes. Basic scientific knowledge for research, practice, and education necessitates reliable, valid measurement tools that differentiate the components and dimensions of the individual symptoms.