Abstract

MORALES ASENCIO, José Miguel. Outcomes Research and Nursing: the Path to Effectiveness in Nursing Care. Index Enferm [online]. 2004, vol.13, n.44-45, pp.37-41. ISSN 1699-5988.

There is a highlighted interest about the way in which the countries can give an effective response to the raising health care demand. Phenomena as the aging of the population, the raising dependency, cronicity of diseases and the inflation of citizens' expectations, are forcing, faced to limited resources, to elucidate closely which health care interventions produce better outcomes in the population. Thereby, a research line about Outcomes Research has developed trying to give answers to this question, but it is full of methodological difficulties:   how can we measure outcomes in health?  Are the clinical parameters the best?  Or the citizen view (satisfaction, health related quality of life.)? Or through the cost-driven view?... It must be added the raising variability of the clinical practice, a direct obstacle  for the homogeneization of outcomes  in health care. In other hand, it is not easy to determine who are the key agents for reaching  outcomes, so there is an additional difficulty: the biomedical oriented outlook is not explicative enough for this purpose. An important part of outcomes depend on human responses to the health situation; therefore, years ago the term nursing practice-sensitive outcomes. In this paper, the different approaches to this concern are exposed, with the current state of development after the incorporation of the Nursing Outcomes Classification, and the developing areas in this type of research.