What Is the NANDA Nursing Diagnosis List?

If you’re a nursing student learning about NANDA nursing diagnoses for the first time, you might be wondering what their purpose is. The NANDA nursing diagnosis list helps nurses create patient-centered care plans by providing standardized diagnoses organized by specialty. These essential pieces of the nursing process guide care and bring your attention to the specific problems that patients are facing.

NANDA nursing diagnoses fall into the second step of the nursing process. During nursing school, you learn this process to help standardize the flow of care. Once you’re a practicing nurse, these steps will become second nature, and you likely won’t even notice that you’re following them.

For review, here are the five essential steps of the nursing process:

• Assessment
• Diagnosis
• Planning
• Implementation
• Evaluation

So, what does this mean for you? In this article, we’ll explore what nursing diagnoses are, list NANDA nursing diagnosis examples, and answer common questions to help you formulate care plans with confidence.

What Is a NANDA Nursing Diagnosis?

NANDA, formally known as NANDA International, is the organization that creates and continuously updates official lists of nursing diagnoses for nurses across the globe. Nursing diagnoses identify patient problems and risks, and guide nursing interventions to help patients experience the best outcomes.

These are different from medical diagnoses, which help guide treatment by identifying diseases and conditions based on symptoms and testing. Medical diagnoses focus on illness and disease, while nursing diagnoses focus on the patient.

The NANDA nursing diagnosis list is a database of nursing diagnoses that can be used as part of the nursing process. Updated every few years, NANDA nursing diagnoses fall into one of these categories:

• Problem-focused nursing diagnosis: Made up of patient issues observed in the assessment phase based on patient reports and physical signs. Problem diagnoses include three parts: the diagnosis, related factors, and defining characteristics.
• Risk nursing diagnosis: Focuses on issues that a patient is vulnerable for, or potential problem diagnoses that nursing care can help avoid.
• Health promotion nursing diagnosis: Focuses on a patient’s motivation to optimize their health and well-being. These can exist for the individual patient, family or community.
• Syndromes: Includes a cluster of nursing diagnoses that happen simultaneously, and can be treated with similar nursing interventions.

Once you’ve selected diagnoses based off of your nursing assessment, NANDA provides nursing interventions that may be appropriate. Then, you’ll use your own critical thinking and nursing judgment to create a care plan for each patient, implement it, and evaluate outcomes.

NANDA Nursing Diagnosis Examples

NANDA publicizes their updated diagnosis list every few years through their membership publication and textbook. Your nursing school will likely require you to purchase one of these resources to refer back to.

Here’s a short list of nursing diagnoses by NANDA and their definitions:

• Acute pain: An unpleasant emotional or sensory experience, associated with damage to tissue. May be evidenced by guarding behavior, restlessness, self-reporting, and diaphoresis (sweating).
• Impaired gas exchange: Imbalance in the patient’s ability to meet their oxygen demands. May be evidenced by cyanosis (bluish coloring), abnormal breathing pattern, cough, and abnormal arterial blood gas labs.
• Risk for aspiration: The patient is at risk for choking or being unable to clear their airway of food or saliva. This can be evidenced by low oxygen saturation, cough, and being unable to clear secretions.
• Impaired skin integrity: The patient’s skin is wounded, broken, at risk for pressure sores, or malnourished. This may be evidenced by visible damage to the skin tissue, hot or tender skin surface, swelling, and bruising.
• Disturbed body image: The patient’s self-perception or their own image is negative or painful. This may be evidenced by intentionally hiding their body or specific body part, refusing to look at themselves, or withdrawing socially.

Each NANDA nursing diagnosis should form a complete sentence that includes your evidence and relating factors. For example, a NANDA nursing diagnosis list for mental health could include:

• Disturbed thought processes related to acute anxiety and intrusive thoughts as evidenced by racing thoughts, difficulty concentrating, and verbalizing feelings of panic. Interventions may include administering as-needed medications, or teaching the patient self-soothing techniques.
• Risk for self-harm related to depressive symptoms and history of suicidal ideation, as evidenced by expressing feelings of hopelessness, self-isolation, and previous suicide attempts. Interventions may include 1-on-1 staff supervision and removing any sharp objects from the patient’s room.
• Ineffective coping related to recent loss of employment, as evidenced by increased irritability, social withdrawal, and decreased self-care activities. Interventions may include providing employment resources and asking if the patient would like to talk about how they are feeling.

NANDA Nursing Diagnoses: FAQs

What is NANDA format in nursing?

The NANDA format is a way to write nursing diagnoses so that they’re standardized and reflect the reasoning behind them. NANDA diagnoses typically follow the PES format:

• Problem: A diagnosis from the list of NANDA nursing diagnosis list
• Etiology: Origin of the problem, which is not a medical diagnosis
• Symptoms: Assessment data that contributes to the diagnosis

How do I write a NANDA care plan?

To write a nursing care plan, you’ll follow the ADPIE steps and use a diagnosis from the NANDA list for nursing diagnosis. Learn more about writing nursing care plans.

Do nurses use NANDA?

Most nurses are introduced to NANDA nursing diagnoses in nursing school. During this time, their purpose is to help you understand the nursing process and familiarize yourself with common patient problems, their symptoms, and interventions.

If you asked the average working nurse whether they use NANDA diagnoses today, they might say no. That’s because the nursing process becomes second nature as you transition from being a student to a working nurse.

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