PURPOSE To investigate which NIC interventions are used by nurses in the urologic unit in order to establish a nursing documentation system for an electronic patient record.
METHODS The NIC Use Survey questionnaire, developed by the Iowa Intervention Project Team, had been translated into Icelandic by a group of nurses within the Directorate of Health. Some changes were made to the questionnaire in concordance with the up-to-date version of NIC; it included 450 intervention labels and their definitions grouped into 27 classes of interventions according to the NIC class structure. Respondents (a convenience sample of 19 nurses who worked in the urological units) were asked to rate how often they performed each intervention. Six responses are possible: never, rarely, about once a month, about once a week, about once a day, or several times a day.
FINDINGS The respondents were 15 nurses (response rate 79%). Most of the subjects had >5 years of experience in nursing (93%) and most had >5 years of experience in urologic nursing (73%).
On the urologic unit, 299 (66%) of the 450 interventions were used rarely or more often by >50% of the nurses. Of those 299 interventions, 153 (34%) were used monthly or more often by more than 50% of the nurses; 151 interventions (34%) were never used by more than 70% of the nurses, and of these interventions 71 (15%) were never used by 100% of the urologic nurses.
CONCLUSIONS The NIC Use Survey was a useful tool to determine which interventions should be included in the computer software of specialities. However, the interventions that are most frequently used by urologic nurses cannot be called core interventions because they include a lot of common nursing interventions and therefore do not define the nature of the speciality.
