The word nursing process enumerates the stages involved in carrying out nursing care. The object of this process is to improve care of the patient. The stages in nursing process consist of:
- Collection of information about the patient.
- by taking a nursing history.
- by assessing condition of patient.
- by using documentary sources of information.
- Use of collected information and through a process of inference, identifying and stating nursing problems, related nursing objectives are identified.
- Writing of a nursing care plan.
- Provision of planned nursing care.
- Assessment of the effectiveness of care.
Collection of information about patient
The collection of information about the patient is important. This can be obtained either from the patient directly or indirectly from relatives, documents or from treating doctors or by noting down history sheets of the patient.
You Must Know Patient’s Nursing Problems And Nursing Process
The problems can be divided into two heads like usual problems and unusual problems.Usual problems are expected ones with nursing knowledge and are extremely common problems.Examples are a need for information on admission,vomiting during anaesthesia unless the stomach is empty or pain in rheumatoid arthritis.
The nursing problem should be identified properly.one of the most important ways of looking at patient is to establish their priority. By this the urgent problems, can be dealt immediately with nursing care. These are summarised as follows :
- Problems which threaten life, the dignity and integrity of individual, the family or the community.
- Problems which threaten destructively to change the individual, the family or community.
- Problem that affect the normal developmental growth of tit individual, family or community.
The priority on problems of an individual patient can be placed as follows:
- Problem that threatens life.
- Problems of pain or discomfort of the patient.
- Problems of distress of the patient.
- Problems which might eventually lead to threaten patients life.
- Problems likely to lead to pain or discomfort.
- Problems which may complicate recovery.
- Problems which might prevent the patient from achieving realistic psychological, economic and social goals in future.
Nursing Care Planning
Patient care planning is the systematic assessment and identification of patient’s problem, the setting of objectives and the establishment of methods and strategies for accomplishing them. (Mayers 1998). A care plan is a written record of identified nursing problems and the nursing action to be adopted to meet the patient’s needs. This also includes the method of evaluating the effectiveness of nursing actions.
Advantages of nursing process are
- The nursing process goes into details of patient care and leaves no chance of negligence.
- It ensures a complete record of the patient’s condition throughout the stay of the patient.
- It also keeps a complete record of nursing care provided to the patient.
- Nursing process provides greater emphasis on social and psychological needs of patient.
