Limitations
There are several limitations to this study. First, nursing
contextual variables were not available. Different
nursing contexts may impact nursing interventions
and outcomes. Future research with more contextual
information is necessary for a more accurate estimation
of the relationships between the care components of
nursing practice. The Nursing Management Minimum
Data Set (Huber et al. 1997) should be considered as
these data are collected.
Five nursing interventions were not considered in
the analyses owing to the violation of the normality
assumption. These interventions may be important to
specific conditions in patients. Further research including
these interventions is needed with much larger
samples. In addition, because of high multicollinearity,
11 nursing interventions were aggregated and represented
as Core Unit Care. Therefore, the individual
effects of each nursing intervention could not be determined.
However, in general, all of these interventions
are provided across settings, and grouping them into
Core Unit Care seems acceptable. Because this study
used only one unit in one hospital, the variability of
nursing care delivered was limited. A replication of
this study across multiple orthopaedic units in a variety
of acute care facilities will provide an opportunity
to expand and validate the study findings.
Implications for nursing management
Nurse managers may utilize the study methods and
findings to compare the cost-effectiveness of providing
a new intervention or managing dosages of interventions
for more cost-effective nursing care delivery.
Nurses and managers need to be engaged in creating
systems to track the cost of nursing interventions and
to manage them for cost-effective delivery of the interventions.
This process ultimately will help improve
cost-effectiveness and quality of nursing care. Efforts
to determine the right dose of an intervention for
patients based on their characteristics is an important
area for future research.
Another important lesson from the study is that the
availability of nursing information is critical for CESs.
Obtaining all necessary data for CES is difficult for
investigators individually without using electronic
databases. Creating a database with comprehensive
nursing information is the prerequisite of nursing
CESs. Electronic nursing information systems (NISs)
are increasing; however, few NISs are designed for
nurses or nurse managers to document and track
nursing interventions and outcomes in a scalable and
standardized manner. It is critical for hospital administrators
and nursing leaders to be involved in designing
an NIS to support nursing practice and management
and in creating nursing data sets to encourage nurses
to clearly document the care they provide. In the
meantime, the use of standardized nursing terminologies
to make nursing data clearly defined, valid, reliable
and comparable is strongly recommended.