title: Measuring the essence of nursing: a guide for future practice.
abstract: Today's changing health care environment presents nursing with the opportunity to expand its role in the health care system. With this opportunity, issues of appropriate education, delegation of supplemental activities to nonprofessionals, and cost of nursing services become significant. Satisfactory resolution of these issues will require a clearly articulated language for what nursing does so that services can be well defined in some way other than a medical model. Once there are clear definitions, competencies for education can be established, decisions regarding delegation of activities can be made, and costs can be assigned. This article describes the use of the Community Health Intensity Rating Scale (CHIRS) as a beginning point for resolving these issues. The CHIRS is a reliable and valid patient classification tool developed to measure the needs of clients of community health nurses as a basis for projecting agency resources required to address those needs. Data elements in CHIRS offer a nursing perspective that incorporates environmental, psychosocial, and health management concerns; more specific definitions of the content and context of care; and an expanded basis for defining resource consumption.
authors.affiliation: Clinical Systems, IQ Technologies, Bala Cynwyd, PA, USA.
authors.forename: D A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Peters
authors.forename: B J
authors.initials: BJ
authors.lastname: Hays
mesh_terms: D002983:Clinical Competence; D003152:Community Health Nursing / Q000193:education / Q000458:organization & administration*; D003365:Costs and Cost Analysis; D006301:Health Services Needs and Demand; D006801:Humans; D007587:Job Description; D009730:Nursing Assessment / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards; D010361:Patients / Q000145:classification*; D010561:Personnel Staffing and Scheduling; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D016526:Workload