kenzalicious349 asked: What are care plans? I see so many posts from nursing students about how awful they are, but I have no idea what they are haha :]
Oh God. How to explain care plans…..
Care plans are this awful write up we get assigned to do on a patient and we must list a nursing diagnosis, interventions, goals, treatments, and a whole bunch of other things. They take FOREVER to do just 1 and some professors demand detail.
See in Clinicals we get assigned a patient. Now the patient has a medical diagnosis of lets say appendicitis (inflamed appendix). As a nurse you must come up with a nursing diagnosis that relates to the medical diagnosis, but it can not be a medical diagnosis because only a Doctor can diagnose that. So for appendicitis a nursing diagnosis could be “acute pain” then you would go on to say that the risk factors of that may be due to a possible rupture of the appendix. You would list your evidence as to how you would know this (patients words, tenderness of affected area) and then go on to write about your nursing interventions which are steps that you the nurse would take to treat this nursing diagnosis and then explain your rational for every single intervention you list. So if we are continuing with pain we would say that our nursing intervention is pain management. Then explain what exactly we would do with 8 nursing interventions (my professors require a minimum of 8 interventions idk how other schools do it). An example of an intervention related to pain management would be administering pain medication. Or provide the patient with alternate activities to distract them from the pain. So for each one you say you must provide rational as to why you would do that and why it is important.
I’m still not good at these so I could be missing something but I think I covered the important things. I’m not sure if this is mandatory of all programs or just mine but we also have to include what medications the patient is on in the care plan and list what is does, how much they are on/frequency, and the possible side effects of it.
Hahaha so yeah a lot of nursing students do talk about these cause they’re a giant pain in the butt!
