Complying with Joint Commission nursing standards: practical documentation tools.

The need for accurate and complete documentation of nursing care has grown as hospitals seek to comply with the new requirements of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. As of January 1991, the Joint Commission implemented standards for nursing services that include documentation of the planning and delivery of nursing care. While the new JCAHO standards do not call for a separate nursing care plan, they nevertheless involve enough changes to require modification of most currently used documentation forms. This article describes the methods used to design new forms at the Carl T. Hayden Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Phoenix, AZ. The newly developed forms are reviewed and compared with the Joint Commission's new standards and scoring guidelines.