1.1 Main purposes
This European Prestandard describes a system of concepts to support the development, maintenance,
comparison and implementation of terminology systems, which in turn support data classification,
communication, storage and retrieval in Nursing Information Systems and Nursing Records. This European
Prestandard includes a set of categorial structures that cover nursing diagnoses and nursing actions.
Even though the Prestandard is centered on nursing needs, it may be used for domains with similar semantic
properties, such as the subject field covered by ICIDH-2.
1.2 Target groups of this European Prestandard
This European Prestandard is for use by
a) developers of coding systems and terminologies on nursing, to assist in the development and
maintenance of a particular system, as well for comparisons among different systems;
b) developers of categorial structures about other systems of concepts, to take into account the relation
with nursing and to be aware of the overlaps among different subject fields;
c) information modellers and knowledge engineers building models for record systems, in particular to
describe the expected content of terminological value domains for particular attributes and data
elements;
d) developers of information systems which need to handle an explicit system of clinical concepts for
internal organization, datawarehouse management and middleware services;
e) developers of software for Natural Language Processing, to facilitate harmonisation of their output with
coding systems and record structures;
f) developers of markup standards for representation of healthcare documents.
1.3 Topics considered outside the scope of this European Prestandard
This European Prestandard is not intended to provide
a) a detailed classification or nomenclature on nursing diagnoses or nursing actions;
b) descriptors and guidelines to represent contextual information for the recording of information within an
electronic healthcare record;
c) an exhaustive list of all the potential details that could appear in expressions of nursing diagnoses and
nursing actions;
d) an exhaustive thesaurus with the complete list of descriptors to be used to describe nursing diagnoses
and nursing actions.