SNOMED International salutes the State of the World’s Nursing 2025, a recently released report that provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the global nursing workforce.
Framed in the context of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, an “action plan for people, the planet and prosperity,” the nursing report confirms that the 12 policy priorities of the World Health Organization (WHO) Global strategic directions for nursing and midwifery 2025 remain highly relevant for the period 2026-2030. It also identifies five emerging policy priorities in the areas of advanced practice nursing, gender equality, digital health and technology, the climate agenda, and nurses in situations of war and conflict.
According to the report, nurses – the largest occupational group in the healthcare sector with about 28 million practitioners worldwide – “must be prepared and fully supported to competently utilize digital technologies across areas of professional practice from education to practice, research and management."
SNOMED International has long supported this goal, initially informally, and then more formally beginning in 2020, when SNOMED International and the International Council of Nurses (ICN) announced an agreement to work together to integrate the International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP) into SNOMED CT in a systematic way. The formal collaboration followed ICN’s review of its role in health informatics globally, enabling them to develop a strategy for supporting nursing globally.
In 2021, SNOMED International released the first ICNP SNOMED CT Nursing Practice Reference Set. The reference set, which is updated and released annually, helps ensure that nursing remains connected to the larger health information landscape.
Nursing content in SNOMED CT also helps to ensure that SNOMED CT continues to adequately reflect global nursing practice; that information collected using ICNP can link to SNOMED CT encoded records and be shared with other healthcare professionals to support care; that nursing care can be captured in a standardized way, reducing inconsistencies; and that the sharing of ICNP-based information can be facilitated in a standardised way to support delivery of patient care, usage for research purposes and participation in health policy making.
“The inclusion of nursing content in SNOMED CT greatly augments its value and utility,” says SNOMED International CEO Don Sweete. “It also supports the level of granularity nursing needs while connecting the profession to the broader healthcare community.”
SNOMED International supports digital health in nursing practice in other ways as well. In 2024, ICN President Dr Pamela Cipriano (now outgoing), who is also a professor of nursing and public policy at the University of Virginia’s School of Nursing and Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, delivered the James Read Memorial Lecture at the SNOMED CT Expo 2024 in Korea. Dr Cipriano, in addition to focusing on how healthcare data fuels nursing care improvement and innovation, discussed how the ICN had adopted a position statement on digital health transformation and nursing practice in which it called for a new terminology standard that facilitates the representation and comparison of nursing domains worldwide.
“Nurses have long been involved in the informatics world and that may not be apparent because that work is usually shrouded with what’s happening in a team or in an organization, but nurses have really come to the forefront in terms of telehealth – being app developers, creating health tracking mechanisms and creating the interface for and use of a lot of devices,” Dr Cipriano said in her address. “Nurses are typically on the front and the back ends of the use of most major technology.”
SNOMED International also hosts a Nursing Clinical Reference Group, a community of practice for nursing-focused clinicians where participants can discuss issues and influence the development and improvement of content in SNOMED CT. The group ensures that the requirements of the international nursing community are incorporated into the content of SNOMED CT International Release and supports the development of nursing and nursing documentation derivative products.
Learn more about the SNOMED International - International Council of Nurses collaboration.
Learn more about the ICNP reference set.
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