Happenings - Nursing Matters: The Nursing and Health Outcomes Project of the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care

Abstract

Outcomes are in. Mitchell (2001) notes that the MEDLINE database includes no research reports on patient outcomes for the period 1978 to 1989 but more than 700 for the period 1997 to 2000. Outcomes are in because accountability has become an important expectation of the health-care system. Outcomes provide evidence for accountability exercises. All components of the health-care system are subject to the gaze of accountability, as are all disciplines. Nursing has had little to offer in terms of hard evidence when asked to demonstrate that nurses make a difference to patient care. Over the last decade there has been increasing activity to fill this gap, with nursing identifying outcomes that demonstrate that nurses do make a difference to patients and their experience of illness and that can be systematically collected and housed on administrative databases. These databases can then serve as the source of information for studies that ask what it is about nursing that matters: numbers of registered nurses, proportion of registered nurses relative to other nursing personnel, number of full-time versus part-time nurses, and nurses' educational preparation or years of experience. Canada is well positioned, because of the national information system maintained by the Canadian Institute for Health Information, to play a leading role in the development of databases that house nursing-sensitive