ATIC Terminology: The Standardisation of Nursing Language

ATIC terminology is a system based on the language used by nursing professionals in their daily lives and which is used in the electronic clinical records, the development of nursing care standards and the exploitation of the information about providing nursing care.

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Description

ATIC is a nursing knowledge architecture project which uses a standardised interface language which is concept-oriented and validated, and which has been implemented in public hospitals and socio-sanitary centres in Catalonia for the past ten years.

The ATIC terminology is articulated on three main axes which allow the representation of the nursing process—assessment, diagnosis (and results) and intervention—as well as on nine secondary axes.

This language, which complements traditional classifications, is characterised by the inclusion of terms based on the natural language that the professionals use in practice, which afterwards undergo a theoretical fine-tuning instance through development procedures and the analysis of concepts and nursing scientific production.

Thus, ATIC is a terminology which bridges the gap between the natural nursing language and the classification systems and which raises the specificity level of terms and concepts to facilitate their representation in logs and electronic clinical history systems, as well as that of the observations, judgements and interventions that the nursing team provides their patients.

In Catalonia, the ATIC terminology is used as nursing vocabulary when logging electronic clinical records, developing care standards and exploiting the information about nursing care provision in the following centres: Hospital Universitari Germans Trias i Pujol (Badalona), Hospital Verge de la Cinta (Tortosa), Hospital Universitari Joan XXIII (Tarragona), Hospital de Viladecans, Hospital Universitari Dr. Josep Trueta (Girona), Hospital Universitari Vall d’Hebron (Barcelona), Hospital Universitari de Bellvitge (Hospitalet de Llobregat), Hospital Universitari Arnau de Vilanova (Lleida), Institut Català d’Oncologia-Hospital Duran i Reynals (Hospitalet de Llobregat), Institut Català d’Oncologia (Badalona), Institut Català d’Oncologia (Girona), Hospital del Pallars, Hospital de la Seu d’Urgell, Hospital Santa Maria (Lleida) y Parc Sanitari Pere Virgili (Barcelona).

Source of information:
Catalanurses.cat: La terminologia ATIC [Internet]. Catalonia [query performed on September 8, 2018]. Available at https://www.catalanurses.cat/projectes/la-terminologia-atic/