Nursing practice refers to the actions performed by nursing professionals to provide care for individuals, families, groups, and communities in need of nursing services. It constitutes a significant portion of the nursing profession’s responsibilities, focusing on assisting individuals, families, groups, and local communities from physical, psychological, cognitive, and social perspectives. Nursing practice includes continuous observation and assessment to anticipate problems, monitoring patients, crisis management, and making nursing judgments when implementing medical treatments based on physicians’ instructions. Nurses assess patients’ responses and make clinical judgments accordingly.

While there is a current emphasis on developing and enhancing nursing practice abilities in basic nursing education and new nurse training, definitions and concepts of nursing practice ability vary and lack uniformity. Key components of nursing practice competency, as proposed by P.M. Schwirian, include leadership, critical care, teaching/collaboration, planning/evaluation, interpersonal relations/communications, and professional development. P. Benner classifies nursing practice competencies into seven domains: helping role, teaching-coaching function, diagnostic and patient-monitoring function, effective management of rapidly changing situations, administering and monitoring therapeutic interventions and regimens, monitoring and ensuring the quality of health care practices, and organizational work-role competencies.

The International Council of Nurses (ICN) has introduced the International Classification of Nursing Practice (ICNP) as a framework consisting of three categories: nursing phenomena, nursing activities, and nursing outcomes. ICNP is widely recognized as a tool for describing nursing practice.

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