Abstract
The number of healthcare institutions implementing quality management systems （QMS） is increasing ever since quality assurance in healthcare came to be recognized as a social issue. The visualization of healthcare service processes is important to improve these processes and ensure delivery of high-quality care.
With the diversity of patients and ever-changing assignments, the nursing process is complex and requires delivery of a variety of services.
This study uses a Process Flow Chart （PFC） for the visualization of nursing care processes to propose a list of nursing care elements indicating units for the PFC and a description method considering the characteristics specific to nursing. Furthermore, items which should be included in the PFC are stipulated.
As a result, the comprehensiveness of the list of nursing care elements and the fact that the list expresses current nursing care tasks using the techniques proposed by nurses without any discrepancies were confirmed. This research enables the visualization of nursing tasks as well as improvement activities for QMS construction utilizing common understanding and detailed information of individual processes.
