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Editorial: Quality Indicators, Research, and the Improvement of Nursing Care in the Nordic Countries

Dear reader of Vård i Norden! The Nordic Nurses Federation, SSN, presented a draft of a report on Quality Indicators in Nursing as a joint collaboration between its member associations at their annual meeting in Copenhagen last September. The report addresses the importance of coming to a coherent agreement with political authorities in implementing specific quality indicators in nursing for the assessment and promotion of the quality of nursing care in the Nordic Countries. The report addresses quality indicators in five areas, and the empirical evidence of their appropriateness. The five quality areas are, nutrition, pain, pressure ulcers, falls, and staffing. Nursing sensitive Quality indicators are factors proven to be useful to measure or assess the contribution of nursing to improved quality of patient care, support services, and organizational function, for better health of patients and nursing care. There are three types of quality indicators – structure indicators (e.g. nurse/patient ratio), process indicators (e.g. prescribed pain medication in surgical wards), and outcome indicators (e.g. fall injury rate). The development of quality indicators in nursing and health care in general is crucial for the establishment of evidence to improve the health and wellbeing of the population. They are however in some ways quite limiting in that they only give an overall indication of the quality of health care, and do not measure all that there is to good nursing. To promote a dialogue within the Nordic countries on the usefulness of nursing sensitive quality indicators within the Nordic welfare and health systems, the next conference of the Nordic Nurses Federation, SSN on November 23–24, 2010 will specifically address this issue. The editorial committee of Vård i Norden – the Nordic Journal of Nursing Research will participate in the preparation of this conference and urges all those who have relevant research in the area of nursing sensitive quality indicators to send in their contributions, which will also be considered for publication in the journal. Researchers, clinicians and politicians will be invited to present and discuss issues relevant to the five quality areas, nutrition, pain, pressure ulcers, falls, and staffing. The current international and Nordic empirical evidence of their appropriateness will be addressed. The evaluation of quality indicators used for political purposes needs to be ongoing in every society. We hope you will join us in this important discussion in the coming year. On behalf of the editorial committee, I wish to thank all the 104 reviewers for their contribution to uphold the quality of our journal, and the authors who have chosen our journal as a venue for their publication in 2009.