Developing a data dictionary for the irish nursing minimum dataset

One of the challenges in health care in Ireland is the relatively slow acceptance of standardised clinical information systems. Yet the national Irish health reform programme indicates that an Electronic Health Care Record (EHCR) will be implemented on a phased basis. [3-5]. While nursing has a key role in ensuring the quality and comparability of health information, the so- called 'invisibility' of some nursing activities makes this a challenging aim to achieve [3-5]. Any integrated health care system requires the adoption of uniform standards for electronic data exchange [1-2]. One of the pre-requisites for uniform standards is the composition of a data dictionary. Inadequate definition of data elements in a particular dataset hinders the development of an integrated data depository or electronic health care record (EHCR). This paper outlines how work on the data dictionary for the Irish Nursing Minimum Dataset (INMDS) has addressed this issue. Data set elements were devised on the basis of a large scale empirical research programme. ISO 18104, the reference terminology for nursing [6], was used to cross-map the data set elements with semantic domains, categories and links and data set items were dissected.