THAILAND (SOUTHEAST ASIA)

The country has a population of about 65 million living in 76 provinces.

The government is currently launching a Universal Healthcare
Coverage policy in order to improve the access to and quality of
healthcare, as well as to contain healthcare expenditure.
NI was first introduced as small special interest groups and later
expanded to the national level through the support of the Nurses
Association of Thailand, the WHO, and the Ministry PH.
 
The Development of a Health Information System
In 1997, the Thai MOPH began to implement a national health information system,
which included the development of a nursing component.
Center for Nursing research at the Department of Nursing, The Faculty of Medicine,
Mahibol University, and the MOPH Nursing Division develop the ideal nursing
minimum data set and a preliminary nursing classification system.
 
Development of an NMDS (Nursing Minimum Data Set)
The first step in developing a nursing information system is to identify an essential NMDS, and
here the process of developing an NMDS specific to Thailand is discussed.
That survey study identified 23 items of nursing data, including:
1. Patient name
2. Hospital number
3. ID number
4. Admission number
5. patient address and phone number
6. address and phone number of significant person
7. gender
8. birthrate
9. religion
10. education
11. health insurance
12. patient and family medical history/allergy
13. admission date
14. medical diagnosis
15. laboratory test
16. nursing problem
 17. using intervention
18. nursing outcome
19. discharge/expired date
20. discharge plan
21. condition before discharge
22. referral
23. home visit.
 
Nursing Information System
Nursing  Information System
 A further to implement the INCP in the Thai nursing environment was developed, a
collaborative software program called "Healthware 2000" by the MOPH Nursing
Division for the collection and retrieval of nursing care data.
Several hospitals serve pilot hospitals. However, the usefulness of the program was
limited by it not being sufficiently user friendly and many nurses having limited
knowledge of the ICNP.
The unsuccessful implementation of Healthcare 2000 lead to the MOPH Division of
Nursing further developing standard care plan using the ICNP, which will later
adopted to computer implementation.This project is still in progress.
Recently the Nurse's Association of Thailand under the leadership of Dr, Jintana
Unipan provided seed money for the development of database including nursing
diagnosis,nursing interventions,and nursing outcomes, in 10 leading diagnostic
-related groups using a version of the beta INCP.
The steering committee for this project comprised nurses from seven specialty areas:
medical nursing, surgical nursing, pediatric nursing ,maternal and child nursing,
mental health and psychiatric nursing, community nursing and home healthcare, and
cancer nursing.
Although the preliminary Thai NMDS has been identified, challenges associated with
its development and implementation within the Thai national health information
system remains. The evident continuity of the development  and implementation
within the Thailand  demonstrates the commitment of the national  nursing
organizations.