Often it happens when a patient is admitted to the general ward of a hospital, he doesn’t get much attention or dedication from the doctors or the nurses as they have to look after hundreds of other patients. In that case, it is very difficult to treat each patient particularly and keep a record of his improvements and the effects of treatments on his health or medical condition.
To eliminate the above-mentioned factors, sometimes a patient or his family decides to give him individual nursing care which means either he is shifted to home or kept admitted in the hospital but there is a particular nursing staff that only takes care of this particular patient. Most of the time, it’s only one nurse but it can be more than once or a group of nurses depending on the condition and seriousness of the patient.
A common nursing care plan for a patient includes the assessment of his medical conditions or diseases, diagnosis by the nursing staff and doctors dedicated to the patient, planning of treatments to cure or improve the health of the patient, implementation of the treatments, and evaluation of these treatments and their effects in order to keep them going or to change to an alternate treatment process. This when joined together, makes a nursing care plan but sometimes, the elements of this care plan also vary depending on each patient’s particular situation and needs.
Key Purposes of Planning a Nursing Care Process:
- Defining the nurses’ role in the treatment and improvement process of a patient
- Providing consistent and individual dedicated care to the patient
- Customizing the treatment process according to the improvements in a patient
- Promotion of holistic treatments
- Keeping on track with the patient’s improvement goals
Basics of Planning a Nursing Care Process:
- Telling the problem and situation the nurse observes
- Helping the doctor or physician with the problem-solving process
- Making useful and well-considered solutions
- Making the assumptions and testing them
- Observing the improvements in a patient and making sure the treatment is working good
- Making sure the patient is getting individual care from the specialists
Advantages of Planning Nursing Care:
- It focuses on each individual patient and is developed to ensure that the patient is responding to the treatment and getting better with each day.
- It enables doctors and physicians to individualize the treatment and care for a particular patient.
- It makes the patient special in his mind and often time, patients respond better to nursing care as compared to general admission in a hospital.
- It helps the nurse(s) to focus on an individual patient and not worry about taking care of other patients in the hospital.
- It helps the supervisor or doctor to assess the performance of each individual nurse related to the improvements in her patient’s health.
- For the patient’s sake, a nursing care plan eliminates most of the errors and mistakes that are common in hospitals.
Free Nursing Care Plan Template:
Here is the preview of our Printable Nursing Care Plan Template created using MS Word.
The download button for our Nursing Care Plan Template is here.
