jjjoy. . .when you talk about instructors being so fanatical about grilling students about the "
wording of the nursing diagnoses, the specific wording of the nursing interventions and goals.... to make sure that we were using impractical 'nurse speak'" then I know you are in a BSN program. These are concerns of professors who are thinking about preparing students who just may be going on into Master's programs, a goal of all BSN courses. They are also reaffirming that you understand and know how to use the NANDA taxonomy. Much of the work on the NANDA diagnoses has come out of university-based research. NOC and NIC research was done at the nursing school of the University of Utah grad program. This is part of the collegiate experience. You won't be dealing with this when you are a working nurse. Wouldn't it be fun to work for a hospital that is closely affiliated with a nursing school that is heavily into researching nursing diagnoses, NOCs or NICs? Wouldn't you love to work for a place that employs Ms. Carpenito or Ms. Moorhouse?
Can you imagine what that would be like?
Honestly, once you are done with school, you'll be able to write a care plan using whatever directions and parameters they give you. Think of NANDA as a piece of equipment, a tool. It can be changed to something else (a whole different set of nursing diagnoses by another company, or just one word symptoms), but the outcome, a plan of care (problem solving), is still the same.
If you can use NANDA and nursing language you can use any other system and it's rules that an employer or agency sets down in front of you and instructs you to follow. That, kiddo, is the difference between a collegiate education and a vocational/technical job training.
I am always trying to get that point across, but it is difficult for students to see that far ahead because you are still trying to learn this stuff. I learned care plans before nursing diagnosis. We only used symptoms to describe the patient problems. You can still do that. It's just that what has overwhelmingly evolved in academia today is the nursing diagnosis. However, there is no law that says that in the work place that nursing diagnoses
have to be the only choice for use on care plans. We didn't always use them on LTC nursing care plans. We sometimes used a medical diagnosis to describe a nursing problem (
).
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It does make sense to me that it is a descriptive statement to intervene in pathobiological processes. Perhaps if other instructors could take a few moments to reinforce this concept then students will value the learning path of careplans. As it stand now, I believe most students believe it is ritualistic torture. 
