Viewpoint

Abstract

Nurses' contributions to healthcare organizational function and their effect on patient care outcomes will be made more explicit and can more readily be measured with terminology that captures the nursing administrative roles at three levels of practice.

Feasibility of Using the Omaha System to Represent Public Health Nurse Manager Interventions

“…To study the effectiveness of nurse management approaches, nurse managers must be prepared to systematically record and evaluate their own decisions and actions (Axelsson, 1998). Documenting nurse manager interventions using a structured, machine-readable nomenclature will provide an invaluable tool for synthesizing knowledge that can affirm or challenge intuition (Campbell, Oliver, Spackman, & Shortliffe, 1998;Clancy, Effken, & Pesut, 2008;Friedman, 2009;Graves & Corcoran, 1989;Kelley, Weber, & Sprengel, 2005). Because there is no such terminology specific to nurse management, examining the capabilities of extant standardized nursing terminologies to describe nurse manager interventions can lay the groundwork for future research in nurse management effectiveness.…”

“…Furthermore, there is potential to study nurse manager outcomes. Nurse manager effectiveness is currently measured by the organization's outcomes (Kelley et al, 2005). Toward this end, the American Organization of Nurse Executives (AONE) devised a set of competencies that describe the conceptual knowledge needed for effective nursing leadership (AONE, 2005).…”