The student nurse adopted and personalized a detailed care plan for her patient

Question

The student nurse adopted and personalized a detailed care plan for her patient the night before her clinical experience. Her patient was admitted for abdominal surgery, and the nurse planned to implement care on the second postoperative day. One of the nursing diagnoses is Acute pain. The prescribed pain medications include IV and oral analgesics, and she was prepared to administer either one. During the morning care, the IV medication was discontinued. The patient refused the oral medication and denied any major discomfort. Every 30 minutes the nurse gathered data about the patient’s pain level and offered pain medication and nonpharmacologic interventions. Finally, the patient asked the nurse to leave him alone. Disappointed, the nurse met with the nursing instructor and said, “I came to clinical fully prepared, and I was all wrong. My patient has no pain. Now I don’t know how to address his needs.” Discuss how the nurse needs to better use the nursing process and improve her critical thinking skills.

Explanation / Answer

Planning for a care is very crucial for a nurse whether she is a student nurse or a registered nurse. Nursing process is a series of steps organised and planned well to deliver excellent quality care for better outcomes. And this process of delivering care is an ongoing process which requires on-going assessments and re-assessments. The nursing process is executed under five phases which includes assessing, diagnosing, planning, implementing, and evaluating.

However to implement this process in place ,the nurse shall need to apply certain skills by the nurse like cognitive, interpersonal and technical skills. Cognitive skills like problem solving, decision making, critical thinking and creativity. Technical skills like subject knowledge both theoritical and practical skills, handling of eqipments and patient care. Interpersonal skills like verbal and non verbal communication, qualities like patience, empathy, honesty.

And it is always necessary to remember while delivering care to a patient is that there can be changes in the care planned which is already well planned and defined because the patient needs can change. Therefore, this point shall be remembered whenever a care is planned for a patient. Morever, before implementing nursing process, the nurse shall remember the following points of requirements of preocess implementation;

- Assess the patient thoroughly for knowing the current needs of the patient and interventions to be decided and analyse the needs. This assessment includes collection of patients baseline data, organize the data with priority, validate and document the data correctly and completely.

- Diagnose the patients needs with the data collected and analyse the client's health risks and strengths of a patient to cope up with the illness. At this stage, the formulation of nursing diagnosis is decided.

- Planning stage enables the nurse to set priorities and goals ,which can help the nurse to decide upon the interventions and can write nursing orders for implementation.

- Implementing stage is very critical because at this level, it is very important to reassess the patient whether the client still need the same intervention which is planned, and to determine other needs for the nurse to assist the client and if the intervention is implemented then need to supervise the care delivered for its effectiveness.

- Evaluating the client for the care given as well as the patient's changing demands or further change in nursing process.

In this case, the patient has denied pain and refused to take oral medication and IV medications were discontinued. So, his pain control is achieved by his self control. He expected some rest without disturbance. So, there is change in need of the client. This is when assessment and reassessment helps the nurse to understand the change in demands. Moreover, the nurse could have learned well about the pain assessment techniques because when there is decline in pain score, the duration of assessment gets changed.

Hence, understanding how the nursing process works is crucial and the importance of subject knowledge is also significant. Moreover, discussing a patients care with a colleague or friend can also help the nurse to receive great insight into nursing process and resolving practical difficulties. And all this can improve her critical thinking skills include critical analysis, clear decision makinh with valid justification, conclusion with clear rationale, distinguishing facts and opinions with supporting facts and documents, clarification of concepts, and recognition of conditions which needs interventions and setting up of goal and work accordingly.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse T
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.