Care Plan Preview

[unionnurse12]

I'm in my last semester of Pre-Nursing classes and my best friend is in her first semester of Nursing school. She had her first care plan assignment this week and I was helping her with it. They give them their case study and other sheets then want them to do the care plan before they are even taught how to do them. We spent 2 hours on the care plan. She wrote what I looked up and figured out from her care plan book. I texted her today and asked how "we" did on the care plan comes to find out "we" did better than most of her classmate!!!

:nurse:I have heard care plans tend to be the hardest part of nursing school, is there any truth to this? If so does this mean I'm already ahead of the curve?

[~Mi Vida Loca~RN, ASN, RN]

It will help for you to have a good understanding of these going in. AN helped me know what a lot of this stuff was before starting NS. That said, I never really found care maps/plans to be all that difficult. (not sure if it was because I had an idea already) I always got them done pretty quick with little effort and was told they were done well.

Now in 4th semester though I just found out we don't have to do any care maps or patient research this semester and I won't miss it!

[ImThatGuy, BSN, RN]

Care plans aren't hard at all. If anything is more difficult than something else to me it's the psychosocial elements. The physiological stuff is cake. It's merely understand the disease or what have you and picking the right nursing diagnosis from the pre-existing NANDA list and applying interventions which you can find in a wealth of books. The more you know about disease process the easier it is to the point you won't have to look for interventions in the books if you're familiar with the condition. They can, however, be time consuming if you have a patient with a lot of problems or a scenario with a lot of co-morbidities particularly if you have to develop a handful of interventions and concurrent evaluations for each condition.