Components

The 21 Care Components provide the standardized framework for classifying each of the two interrelated CCC terminologies: CCC of Nursing Diagnoses and CCC of Nursing Interventions. They are used to code and classify the six steps of the Nursing Process: Assessment, Diagnosis, Outcome Identification, Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation.

Definition

A nursing care component is defined as a cluster of elements that represents a unique pattern of clinical care nursing practice; namely, Health Behavioral, Functional, Physiological, and Psychological. For more information, please see the 21 Care Components by Four Patterns of Care

Description

The 21 Care Components are designed to provide the standardized framework for coding and classifying the CCC System terminologies. They are further categorized by four health patterns namely: Health Behavioral, Functional, Physiological, and Psychological to facilitate further analysis. The 21 Care Components are designed to classify the care process for an episode of illness, facilitate computer processing, and statistical analyzes. They are also used to track and measure patient/client care holistically over time, across settings, population groups, and geographic locations. They were found to be the most clinically relevant assessment classes, best predictors of health resources, and the most appropriate standardized framework for coding and classifying patient care regardless of setting (Holzemer et al., 1997). They were also found to be 99 percent compliant for coding disease conditions in a variety of health care settings.

Design Strategy

The 21 Care Components were empirically developed by statistically grouping the clinical care concepts from the two relevant nursing diagnosis and intervention lists. Each developed Care Component consisted not only of sufficient statistically data, but also clinically significant data that warranted a separate class/grouping. Further, each class/grouping consisted of distinct but separate diagnostic concepts/labels and nursing interventions/services concepts that represented clinical nursing practice.

This standardized framework makes it possible for computer processing and statistical analysis of the care data to predict care requirements, determine resources, measure outcomes, as well as link and/or map the terminologies together and to other health-related classifications.

For more information please visit the "Framework" and "Tables" Sections of this website.