subject: Advantages of the Nursing Process in Care Planning [print this page] Advantages of the Nursing Process in Care Planning
The nurse care planning process is an important aid in the treatment of patients. In turn it creates a systematic care plan approach which with the inclusion of other health care professionals allows the patients the best route to full fitness.
When used effectively, the nursing process offers many advantages:
It's patient-centred, helping to ensure that your patient's health problems and his response to them are the focus of care.
It enables you to individualise care for each patient.
It promotes the patient's participation in their care, encourages independence and concordance and gives the patient a greater sense of control important factors in a positive health outcome.
It improves communication by providing you and other nurses with a summary of the patient's recognised problems or needs.
It promotes accountability for nursing activities, which in turn promotes quality assurance.
It promotes critical thinking, decision-making and problem-solving.
It's outcome-focused and encourages the evaluation of results.
It minimises errors and omissions in care planning.
Basis for the nursing care planning process
The nursing process is based on the scientific method of problem-solving, which involves:
stating the problem you observed
forming a hypothesis about the solution to the problem (if then' statements)
developing a method to test the hypothesis
collecting the test data
analysing the data
drawing conclusions about the hypothesis.
A scientific fact
Most people use the scientific method instinctively, without being aware they're doing it. Simply picking out which pair of shoes best complements your favourite outfit is an exercise in the scientific method. So if you're familiar with the scientific process, the nursing process probably seems familiar.
Nursing process steps
The nursing process encompasses five steps:
assessment
nursing diagnosis
planning
implementation
evaluation
Following these steps systematically in this order enables you to organise and prioritise patient care especially critical for the novice nursing student. It also helps ensure that you don't skip or overlook important information. When used correctly, the nursing process ensures that the care plan is revised when new problems arise or patient outcomes remain unmet. It also allows the care plan to be discontinued when patient outcomes have been met.
Just how many steps are there?
Nurses are accountable for all aspects of their practice, including the way in which they use the nursing process to organise and deliver nursing care (NMC 2008). However, the number of stages in the nursing process is something that is hotly debated!
The initial definition of the nursing process from the 1950s listed only three steps: assessment, planning and evaluation; however, depending on who you ask, the nursing process can now consist of four, five or even six stages:
assessment
nursing diagnosis
outcome identification
planning
implementation
evaluation.
In the United Kingdom, the nursing process has traditionally been seen as consisting of four stepsassess, plan, implement and evaluatewith nursing diagnosis incorporated into the assessment stage and outcome identification forming the fi rst part of the planning stage.
In this book, we are going to continue to focus on a fi ve-step process that includes nursing diagnosis as a separate stage between assessment and planning, as this provides the most effective framework for getting to grips with the nursing process.
Domino effect
Although the five nursing process steps are sequential, they are also continuous and overlapping. For instance, when performing an intervention, such as changing your patient's dressing, you should also be assessing his skin. What's more, these steps are inter-related, with each one infl uencing all the subsequent steps. For instance:
Your assessment must be thorough and accurate so that you formulate the appropriate nursing diagnosis.
The nursing diagnosis you formulate must be appropriate to ensure that you choose reasonable outcomes.
The outcomes you identify must be appropriate so that you outline correct interventions.
The interventions you choose must be appropriate so that your patient will make progress toward the outcomes you've established.
Remember that the nursing process guides all the nurse's actions and decisions, regardless of the number of steps cited.
