In 2025, the International Council of Nurses (ICN) released an updated definition of nursing to reflect the evolving scope, responsibilities, and global impact of the profession. This revised definition emphasizes nursing as a science-based, ethically grounded profession committed to health equity, culturally safe care, leadership, and advocacy. The work of NANDA International (NANDA-I) closely aligns with and operationalizes this definition by providing a standardized nursing language that supports autonomous practice, collaboration, and the generation of nursing knowledge.
The ICN (2025) defines nursing as “a profession dedicated to upholding everyone’s right to enjoy the highest attainable standard of health, through a shared commitment to providing collaborative, culturally safe, people-centred care and services.” The definition further states that nursing “acts and advocates for people’s equitable access to health and healthcare, and safe, sustainable environments.” This framing positions nursing as both a clinical and social profession, grounded in human responses, ethical responsibility, and global accountability.
One of NANDA-I’s strategic priorities is to strengthen nursing’s professional identity through standardized language. NANDA-I nursing diagnoses articulate nurses’ independent clinical judgments about human responses to health conditions and life processes. Many diagnoses reflect the complex physical, psychosocial, cultural, and ethical dimensions of care described in the ICN definition. By naming these responses, NANDA-I reinforces nursing autonomy and makes the unique contribution of nursing visible across settings and populations.
The ICN’s updated definition emphasizes collaborative, people-centred, and culturally safe care across all settings. NANDA-I diagnoses are intentionally developed for use with individuals, families, groups, and communities, whether they are experiencing illness, wellness, or health transitions. This global applicability aligns with NANDA-I’s strategic priority of ensuring relevance across diverse health systems and cultural contexts, supporting nursing practice beyond acute care environments.
The ICN (2025) also highlights nursing’s responsibility for leadership, advocacy, education, and research. NANDA-I advances these aims by providing a research-ready knowledge structure that supports data aggregation, outcomes measurement, and evaluation of nursing-sensitive outcomes. As a foundational component of the nursing process, nursing diagnoses enable linkage to outcomes and interventions, supporting evidence-based practice, quality improvement, and policy influence.
Beginning in 2026, NANDA 360 integrates nursing diagnoses with patient goals and outcomes, as well as nursing actions, creating a comprehensive and person-centered view of nursing practice. This approach aligns with the ICN’s emphasis on collaborative, people-centered, and culturally safe care by ensuring that nursing judgments are directly connected to what matters to patients and communities. Within NANDA 360, patient goals and outcomes articulate desired health states from the patient’s perspective, while nursing actions represent the intentional, evidence-informed interventions nurses use to support those goals. Additionally, nurses will be able to quickly see the level of evidence of each proposed nursing action statement (using a GRADE score), enabling the selection of the best possible action that matches with given resources available to the nurse, and patient input. Together, these elements demonstrate nursing’s accountability for both process and outcomes of care, reinforcing the profession’s role in promoting health, preventing illness, alleviating suffering, and advancing health equity across settings.
In summary, NANDA-I transforms the ICN’s 2025 definition of nursing from a conceptual statement into actionable practice. Through standardized language, global applicability, and support for research and the nursing process, NANDA-I ensures that nursing’s autonomous, collaborative, and socially responsive role is clearly articulated and sustained worldwide, in a platform that supports education, practice and research.
References
International Council of Nurses. (2025). Definition of nursing. https://www.icn.ch
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