Abstract
An exploratory descriptive study with a quantitative approach whose objective were: to identify the nurses’ diagnoses in homeless women, using the domains and classes of the NANDA Taxonomy II as its basic structure. The sample was composed of forty homeless women, who attend philanthropic institutions in the downtown area of the city of São Paulo. The data were collected between January thirty first and July thirty first of 2006. As for the diagnoses, forty-two classified by the NANDA Taxonomy II were identified. The ten most frequent diagnoses were: inefficient health maintenance (80%); damaged dentition (78%); constipation (35%).We identified thirty other diagnoses, which we decided to call probable, since the defining characteristics and related factors did not match the NANDA Taxonomy. Moreover, other very particular situations were identified in this population; most of them were of a social character, which had neither been included in the identified diagnoses nor in the probable ones, due to the lack of elements to classify them.
