Share your assessment policies?

RNPATL, DNP, RN · Feb 12, 2005

Would any of you share your MS assessment/reassessment policies? I am helping to update our policies and have not found any help from AMSN or any other professional organization. What are your routines for VS, assessment, etc? We have a mix of peds, mental health, geriatic, surgical, medical, 23 hour obs, OP transfusions, swing, hospice, step-down. We are a 28 bed dept in a 41 bed community hospital. Any help is appreciated...the task is daunting!

We just finished this task and it was indeed daunting! We decided as a group that we would have one general policy for assessment that would cover the entire hospital .... for example .... it is a standard that ALL patients will be assessed by an RN at least every 12 hours. Of course, this is overkill for swing patients, but we wanted one general policy so it would be easier to remember.

We then split the remainder of the policies for each department director to address. They each had a deadline and when that time was near, we collected their drafts and put an entire policy together. It worked well, but was very tough combining all the areas.

Good luck. The only resource we really used were the Joint Commission Standards and clinical practice standards from other community hospitals.