Abstract
Contemporary medicine can deal with a lot of previously uncontrollable diseases. It brings great hope.
If the hope is fulfilled frequently, however, it easily changes into expectations or even claims. This, together with the growing autonomy of the patient and lawyers ready to sue, led to what is called "defensive medicine".
Its important tools are strict and detailed formalization and perfect documentation. Defensive medicine is such a big problem for the quality and financing of medicine, that some experts call for "creating culture of uncertainty"; but it is a huge psychological challenge.
With the hi-tech medicine and demographical changes in developed countries the nursing is becoming more and more important profession. The role of nurses has ever been unappreciated.
Now there are attempts to establish the scientific basis of nursing (Evidence Based Nursing) and make nursing more valued. Scientific base means forming separate detailed nursing taxonomies: nursing diagnoses, nursing interventions and nursing-sensitive patient outcomes as well as the separate thorough nursing documentation.
Taxonomisations are prerequisites for understanding the life, the world and their management, they promise to bring certainty, control, manageability. But nursing is by its nature more affected by uncertainties than medicine; nurses' work consists largely of working with emotions, language and it is context-bounded.
Our goal is to analyse whether nursing taxonomies can bring what they promise. Maybe it is rather a step towards "defensive nursing".
But do nurses have another option if there is no will of societies to accept uncertainty and to "create culture of uncertainty"?