Hi All!

Our NICU is about to begin the process of creating a new Neonatal Pathway/ Plan of Care. According to JCAHO, a plan of care is required but it does not list specifications. I have worked for two NICU's and ours were completely different so I am reaching out to see what everyone else does for theirs. If you could help us out it would be greatly appreciated!!!

The one we are currently using is on paper (and will stay this way) and is about 7 pages long. We are attempting to shorten/condense it. Does anyone have a shorter POC they would be willing to share details about?

Thank you so much in advance :)

What plan of care are you referring too? And what does JCAHO mean? You may need to provide more information.

What type of POC? We have several care plans we use for different diagnosis. Individualized for each patient in EPIC. Do you mean an algorithm for admission or something similar?

JCAHO is the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare.

We have a single plan of care packet that we chart on throughout the infants hospitalization- We sign off on it when certain tasks are completed (ie IVF started at 80ml/kg/day, temperature stabilization, feedings tolerated, teaching parents, etc). There are about 10 different categories you can chart on (Assessment, Nutrition, Teaching, Immunizations, Medications, etc). In my old NICU, we had our POC integrated into our computer charting. It is to be addressed every shift, so if we increased feedings I would choose to chart on the nutrition section and free text "infant tolerating increase in feedings." At the NICU I am at now, they were unable to get a proper POC with our computer system so we still have it on paper, which does not give us the option to free text. It is basically, like I mentioned, a list of check offs throughout their stay. However, it cannot be individualized to the patient like computer charting can be. There are many tasks that only apply to half of our population, so a group of us were asked to revisit this. I am just curious if other people have this in paper form and what theirs looks like. We would love to just do away with it but it is a JCAHO requirement to have a POC.

Well that sucks. That doesn't even sound like a care plan. So they have short and long term goals with interventions? You probably need to start from scratch. If you used electronic careplans before you could create them from that type of template. A checklist really isn't a care plan.