Basic Nursing 1st Edition by Judith Wilkinson, Leslie Treas

Exercise 26

Read about the following study, and then answer the questions at the end of the box.
Muller-Stauber, M., Lavin, M.A., Ian, N., et al. (2006). Nursing diagnoses, interventions and outcomes-application and impact on nursing practice: Systematic review. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 56(5), 5 14-531.
Researchers analyzed the content of 36 published studies to examine the outcomes of using nursing diagnosis. Specifically, they looked at effects on quality of patient assessments, accuracy, and completeness of nursing diagnoses, and on coherence among nursing diagnoses, interventions, and outcomes documented. They found the following:
• The use of nursing diagnoses improved the quality of documented patient assessments.
• The completeness of nursing diagnoses in practice is problematic; signs and symptoms or etiology were often lacking or incompletely described.
• There was some evidence for coherent use of documented nursing diagnoses, interventions, and outcomes.
• There was some evidence that nursing diagnoses improved the quality of interventions documented.
• There was no evidence that use of nursing diagnoses improved outcomes in patients.
Please answer the following question:
From this study, could you reasonably infer that using nursing diagnoses led to nurses' documenting patient interventions better? Why or why not?