Standardized nursing terminologies (SNT) have been developed to describe the nursing process systematically. The aim of this research was to study the applicability of the Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC) in the psychiatric outpatient care setting in Finland. The research includes three phases. In the first phase using an integrative literature review we identified nursing interventions in research publications (n=60) and used the NIC to analyze the identified interventions. In the second phase, we used an ethnographically oriented work-place study to identify interventions in the clinical setting. This included observations and interviews and the findings were analyzed together with nurses (n=17). The core interventions were identified using the Delphi method. The panelists consisted of nurses and nurse managers (round one n=54, round two n=26). In the third phase we identified nursing interventions in nursing progress notes (n=1150) and in nursing care summaries (n=17) and mapped these into the NIC.

In all we identified 105 different nursing interventions, of which 95% could be mapped into the NIC. The emphasis was in interventions aiming at behavioral change and more specifically interventions that support coping by building on patients’ strengths. In nursing documentation, the most frequent interventions were Surveillance and Care Coordination. The group delivery method was common in all phases. The findings of this study emphasize the need for a systematic terminology to describe nursing interventions for nurses to conceptualize their work, to make the work visible and to ensure the quality of nursing documentation. The broad coverage, descriptiveness of the interventions and the taxonomical structure of the NIC support its applicability. However, the interventions in the classification were found to be overlapping which limits the systematic transfer of information and the possibilities for secondary use of data. Additional limitations are the lack of semantic coherence with the concepts used in research and the difficulty of describing interventions delivered using the group method. This research generated recommendations for the development of the classification. The most central ones include the need to include multiple methods in the research and development and the integration of concepts used in research literature.