If you’re interested in nursing as a potential career, you may have heard about nursing interventions and wondered what they are. Keep reading to learn all about nursing interventions, including the 3 categories, 4 types, and 7 domains of nursing interventions.
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Nursing interventions are actions that nurses take to promote health, prevent disease, and help patients heal and recover from illness and injury.
In other words, interventions are the things that nurses do to care for their patients. Ideally, they’re evidence-based and are aimed at achieving specific outcomes.
Common nursing interventions include:
Nurses play an important role in promoting self-care and helping patients to make lifestyle changes that can improve their overall health and well-being. Nursing interventions are tailored to meet the needs of each patient, family, or group and can be modified as the patient’s or family’s needs change.
The Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC) is a system that was first published in 1992 as a way to standardize the language and communication of nursing work and “serve as the foundation for (the) nursing process in nursing practice, education, and research”.
Based on ongoing research, the NIC system provides a comprehensive list of standardized nursing interventions that can be used to address patient care needs, regardless of where they may live.
The most recent 7th edition of the NIC was published in 2018. It contains 565 standardized nursing interventions and over 13,500 nursing activities.
Along with the Nursing Outcomes Classification system (NOC), the purpose of NIC is to provide standardized terms and nursing language for “…documenting nursing care, communicating nursing care across settings, sharing data across systems, evaluating outcomes, conducting effectiveness research, measuring nursing productivity, evaluating nursing competencies, facilitating reimbursement…determining staffing needs, designing curriculum and for inclusion in big data sets.”
Nursing interventions can be classified into three categories:
Independent nursing interventions are those that can be carried out by the nurse without seeking input or help from others. For example, administering most medications or changing a dressing.
Dependent nursing interventions are those that require the help or supervision of another healthcare professional. For example, stopping the bleeding from a wound that needs suturing.
Interdependent nursing interventions are those that require the coordinated efforts of a nurse and at least one other member of the healthcare team. For example, when performing CPR, a nurse may provide chest compressions while another team member provides ventilation for a patient.
Based on their roles in healthcare, nurses use four main types of nursing interventions to achieve specific health-related outcomes, depending on the people they care for:
These 4 types of nursing interventions can be carried out in many different settings, including hospitals, clinics, schools, and even patients’ homes.
Health promotion interventions aim to improve people’s overall health and well-being and prevent injuries.
Nurses can provide patient education on healthy lifestyle choices such as eating a healthy diet and exercising regularly.
In addition, nurses can help patients to quit smoking and reduce their alcohol intake.
The goal of disease prevention interventions is to reduce the risk of people developing specific diseases and illnesses.
Immunizations are one of the most important nursing interventions in this category. Immunizations help to protect individuals from diseases, many of which can be deadly. By ensuring that patients are up-to-date on their vaccinations, nurses can help reduce the spread of disease and save lives.
Nurses also play an important role in providing education about the importance of immunizations. By raising awareness about the dangers of disease and the efficacy of vaccines, nurses can help to promote immunization rates and improve public health.
The purpose of treatment interventions is to manage and treat existing health problems.
The most common treatment nurses provide is pain control. Nurses administer analgesics, reposition patients, provide cold packs, and elevate injured extremities.
Rehabilitation interventions help patients regain function after an injury or illness.
Some examples of this include:
GCU's College of Nursing and Health Care Professions has a nearly 35-year tradition of preparing students to fill evolving healthcare roles as highly qualified professionals. GCU offers a full spectrum of nursing degrees, from a pre-licensure BSN degree to a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) program.
