I am a little curious how care plans differ from one school to another. I am in my second semester of an ADN program. We have to do 3 care plans each week. For each one we have to do 2 pages of pathophysiology, come up with 5 nursing diagnoses, then do a care plan on the priority diagnosis. The actual care plan is 4 pages long (one page for each of our 4 interventions) and we are expected to write at least 10 sentences for our rationales. Not to mention the 6 pages of labs to fill in, all the patients meds (usually 2 pages), any x-rays or diagnostic procedures, and a few more pages about demographics, adls, etc. Each one is a total of 23 pages! This takes FOREVER to do. Most of the time spent flipping through our texts finding sources for patho and rationales.
They aren't that hard, just extremely time consuming. After getting my patients' information and driving home from the clinical site its about 6:30 pm, so I have a total of 12 hours to do three 23 page care plans, sleep, get ready to go, and drive back to the clinical site. I rarely get more than 3-4 hours sleep and some of my classmates don't sleep at all! And they expect us to provide safe patient care. I just don't understand. As much as I've tried to convince myself that I don't, I do learn from doing these care plans, but I think I would learn more if I only had to do one or if they were less involved because by the time I'm done I'm a zombie. I can only imagine how bad it will get the next two semesters.
I have seen posts about care plans that lead me to believe a lot of you don't have to do quite as much as this. I basically just want to know how many of you are in the same boat. Does anyone have it worse than this?