Report from the ISO Meeting

(To Dr. Judy Ozbolt from Christopher Chute, M.D)

(posted with permission of Dr. Ozbolt) The new work item proposal "Development of a Reference Terminology Model for Nursing" was presented in the WG3 plenary of ISO TC215, meeting in Tokyo. As expected, debate was rather long, focusing on whether any group should have a domain specific model, even though it was emphasized how closely this model would integrate with existing and devleoping work. We had strong nursing support and comentary from Korea and Canada at this meeting. I am pleased to report that at the end, there was unanimous support for the proposal among WG3 members present. This will be reported to the TC215 full committee plenary Thursday (though I will not be there.) There was a motion, which I supported, to recommend a name change to the proposal to: "Integration of a Reference Terminology model for Nursing." Sentiment was quite strong for this, and I did not see it violating the spirit or intentions of your effort. There was no serious discussion of changing the wording of the scope or purpose and justification. An effort to forward the item as a Technical Report Proposal instead of a Standard Proposal was ultimately deflected. The observation was made that the proposed time period (Dec 2003) is outside that permitted in the ISO process, and a friendly amendment was made to modify this to be 18 months after rratification, expected next July. Please realize that one can propose components of what might prove to be a larger work as a way around the difficulties of getting something out sooner. I think great weight was paid to the obvious international nature of the proposal development process, the quality of preliminary work, and the explicit recognition that this provides a forum to integrate a terminology model that will address the functional needs in nursing with the collaborations detailed in your proposal. Congratulations on a year of preparation well done and clearly recognized. Christopher G. Chute, M.D.