Nursing Protocols: Necessity for their Development and Implementation in Greece

Over the last few decades interest in the development and implementation of guidelines and protocols has been steadily increasing. It is clear from the literature that there is confusion in the use of these concepts. While the guidelines concern all healthcare professionals, their main feature is that they are general statements without operationaltechnical details as opposed to protocols that concern a particular category of health professionals and show in detail who does what, at what time and in what way. The necessity to develop and implement nursing protocols based on international classifications of nursing diagnoses, interventions and desirable goals aims at developing a "common language" among nurses, estimate the resources needed to provide high quality health care as well as the acquisition of the possibility of comparative quantitative and qualitative evaluation between the output produced by the nurses on national and international level. Prerequisites for the successful development of nursing protocols and their adoption in the daily practice of nurses are the change of organizational culture, effective management of change, high level education and continuing training of nurses, the use of international classifications and finally the use of Health Informatics Technology to facilitate the work of nurses. International experience to date can work in a consultative way to tackle inhibitory factors in the process of transition to the universal application of nursing protocols in Greece.