Standardized Nursing Language (Essay Sample)

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Tutor
Institution
Nursing and Standardized Language
In nursing profession, language is often used to inform and to facilitate quality care as well as educate recipients of that care. It should be understood that revelation of the impact of nursing care on patient outcomes heavily rely on the universal understanding of nursing terminologies (Stein-Parbury 2005). In this light, it is very critical that what is transmitted is commonly interpreted by all nurses. For instance, the language used in a psychiatric facility may vary from the other health facilities and this poses a threat to administering nursing services efficiently; thus the importance of a standardized language.
Advantages of standardized language
One major benefit of standardized language is that it increases the visibility of nursing interventions and this result to improved patient care. Nurses are fond of using informal notes to verbally report to each other rather than use care plans and patient records therefore, making their work invisible (Pearson, 2003). The use of standardized language effectively counters this invisibility by shedding light.
In addition, using standardized language in the nursing practice ensures data quality especially where electronic patient records are being used. Take for example an instance where a diagnosis gets wrongly coded because a nurse misunderstood the language or code used. With a standardized language such errors will be avoidable.
Challenges of standardized language
Many clinical areas use a number of paper and electronic forms where the same form is duplicated but lacks consistency of structure. A lot of extra work is created and this slows down the flow of information considerably (Gogler et al, 2010). For instance, a patient’s weight may be needed for a number of forms such as pressure ulcer risk and maybe nutritional assessment and if some are filled in stones and pounds and others in kilograms information flow i...