The Nursing and Health Outcomes Project.

Increasingly, administrative databases are playing major roles in decisions regarding the effectiveness and funding of the health-care system. These databases contain information taken from patients' charts after their discharge and include their age, gender, diagnoses, medical interventions and length of stay Although nurses are the largest health-care provider group in all sectors of the Canadian health-care system, the nature and effectiveness of their contributions to patient care are not captured on administrative databases because no information about nurses' contribution to care is abstracted from charts. The Nursing and Health Outcomes Project (NHOP) was established by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care to identify nursing-sensitive patient outcomes and their attendant nursing inputs and processes that could be housed on databases. This article describes the background to this project and reports on the progress to date. The implications of having this information on databases will be examined.