Nursing Interventions Classification

The Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC) is a care classification system which describes the activities that nurses perform as a part of the planning phase of the nursing process associated with the creation of a nursing care plan.

The NIC provides a four level hierarchy whose first two levels consists of a list of 433 different interventions, each with a definition in general terms, and then the ground-level list of a variable number of specific activities a nurse could perform to complete the intervention. The second two levels form a taxonomy in which each intervention is grouped into 27 classes, and each class is grouped into six domains.

An intent of this structure is to make it easier for a nurse to select an intervention for the situation, and to use a computer to describe the intervention in terms of standardized labels for classes and domains. Another intent is in each case to make it easy to use a Nursing Minimum Data Set (NMDS).

The terminology is an American Nurses' Association–recognized terminology, which is included in the UMLS, and is HL7 registered.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]

References

^ Iowa Intervention Project (1996). Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC) (2nd ed.), St. Louis: Mosby-Year Book
^ Henry SB, Warren JJ, Lange L, Button P., "A review of major nursing vocabularies and the extent to which they have the characteristics required for implementation in computer-based systems", J Am Med Inform Assoc. 1998 Jul–Aug;5(4):321–8
^ Henry SB, Mead CN., "Nursing classification systems: necessary but not sufficient for representing 'what nurses do' for inclusion in computer-based patient record systems", J Am Med Inform Assoc. 1997 May–Jun;4(3):222–32
^ Nursing Interventions Classification Archived 2008-04-16 at the Wayback Machine