Challenges associated with the secondary use of nursing data

There is a prevailing ‘collect once, use many times’ view of clinical data and its secondary use. This study challenges this view through an assessment of the degree to which the International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP) might be used to provide raw data for the Belgian Nursing Minimum Data Set (B-NMDS). A mapping exercise identified exact matches between ICNP and B-NMDS for just 8% of B-NMDS care descriptions; no matches at all for 23%; possible broader matches in ICNP for 55%; possible narrower matches for 8%; and a possible broader and narrower match for 1%. Refining ICNP content and developing and implementing purposive data sets or catalogues that accommodate both ICNP concepts and B-NMDS care descriptions would lay the foundations for the potential re-use of primary ICNP-encoded data in populating the B-NMDS. One unexpected result of the study was to re-affirm the utility of ICNP as a reference terminology.