Community Nursing Care Plans

no. it's not likely that you are going to find examples anywhere. we had to do one of these when i was in my bsn program as well. this is nothing more than the same old care plans you've been doing for patients. remember what the steps of the nursing process are and how they translate into the steps of writing a care plan:

1. assessment (collect data)
   
2. formulate nursing diagnoses
   
3. write measurable outcomes and interventions
   
4. initiate the care plan
   
5. determine if outcomes have been met

one of your biggest parts of this project is going to be your assessment. when we had to do ours, we were given some instruction on this. we were to interview at least two community leaders. we were each given a specific geographical area of the city and we were to take a physical tour of that area and make observations about what we saw. we also had to assess based upon the nursing framework that all our care plan assessments were done which happened to be the stress model.

just like you review pathophysiology of diseases, you will have to spend some time in the library doing some research and reading about what an ideal community should be. use that as your basis for a "normal" assessment. in performing your assessment take into consideration what some leaders feel is causing major problems and what some of the solutions might be. this reading is going to be critical to this care plan (or paper). remember that the second step of the care plan process is to extract out and list the abnormal data you obtained during your assessment. in order to do that you have to have some idea of what is abnormal, hence all the reading unless you have already been provided with an assessment model to use.

i focused on one major problem that pertained to the general healthcare of my community. from that i developed one or two nursing diagnoses. we were not allowed to use standard nursing diagnoses. the nanda system of nursing diagnosis is very much about the wording that is used. for something like this, you have limited nanda diagnoses, so you may well have to develop your own. we had to compose and write our own. my nursing interventions were developed from and based upon more articles i had found in my library searching.

you might want to talk with your instructor just to verify that this is the direction you are to head with this. review the information in your community nursing textbook on what good health of a community should be to help you is assessing your assigned community. if you weren't assigned a specific community, then you'll have to pick on out for yourself.

some of the things that i remember them telling us to look at were things like free clinics, child and adult day care centers, sanitation, and how immunization services were delivered. good people to interview or go to for ideas on potential problems in a community are social workers, public health nurses, clergy, city councilmen, and police officers as these people are in the area all the time seeing how some of the problems are directly affecting the people.

one other thing. in your reading, you are not going to see politicians and community icons who write about these things referring to their work as "care plans" for a community. the "care" part of the phrase will be left out. i would try to think of the politicians and leaders as being the docs who are diagnosing the diseases and we nurses as the ones trying to patch things up and keep them going with what resources we've got to work with. same as we do in any other places we work.