Structured visualization of expert nursing--An educational program for stoma self-care.

To provide an adequate educational program for patients with a stoma, we have developed an algorithm which was divided into three parts according to the period, i.e., the preoperative period, postoperative period, and rehabilitation period. It was composed of action nodes, thinking nodes, choice branches, assessment item tables, reference tables, and candidate logic tables. Wound Ostomy Continence Nurses (WOCNs) used this algorithm. The results indicated that the algorithm did not omit any important points involved in stoma care, and that it could therefore be successfully applied to patients with a stoma.