The Turkish version of the Omaha System: Its use in practice-based family nursing education

SummaryThe aims of this manuscript are to examine the validity and reliability of the Turkish version of the Omaha System, and to demonstrate its effectiveness as a tool for nursing education. In this methodological and descriptive study, seventy students attending a training program used the Omaha System in clinical practice settings for assessing health problems of 157 clients and for nursing interventions during 378 home visits. After the system’s adaptation to the Turkish language, its content validity was reconfirmed through feedback from the students and interrater reliability was tested on six independent students with kappa statistics. The reliability scores were at a statistically significant level when coding the records using the Omaha System. Clinical practice was explained with 332 problems and 1783 nursing intervention terms. Study findings indicate several strengths, including high reliability – except in target terms, coding of problems and interventions, improved understanding of the course, as well as some limitations: the need for new terms and more time required for manual documentation. The findings of the study supported the usefulness of the Omaha System in describing the practice of community health nursing.