Methods to validate nursing diagnoses.

Ever since nurses began officially to label the phenomena that they diagnose and treat, there has a need to validate the existence of those phenomena. Nurses who use the official North American Nursing Diagnosis Association (NANDA) list of nursing diagnoses often find the diagnostic labels and their defining characteristics are not relevant and are not what they identify in clinical practice. If this problem continues, nurses will not have confidence in the official diagnoses and will view them, at best, as an academic exercise imposed by nursing leaders divorced from the real world of nursing. A source of the problem is that many of the nursing diagnoses on the current NANDA-approved list were included with little empirical evidence. To be on the improved list means that the diagnosis has been accepted for further testing, validation, and refinement.