A hospital survey on the utilization of the master file of the standardized nursing practice terminology in Japan.

A common language in nursing facilitates better communication among nurses and other healthcare providers, assuring better nursing care, hence better patient outcomes. As we developed and disseminated the standardized terminology of nursing which provided nurses with a set of terms to describe nursing observations and nursing actions, we run a survey to see how much it was recognized and utilized in actual clinical settings. The result showed that approximately 60% of the respondents were cognizant of our terminology, and again 60% of them were either actually using the terminology or interested in using it in the future. For them, the main purposes of utilizing the terminology were nursing documentation and care planning. Sometimes it was used as an educational tool. This suggests that we should further develop a tool to assist nurses with their documentation and care planning alongside the revision of the terminology itself.