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Discussion

Care Plans

I am in nursing school right now and we have to do a care plan. Including functional health patterns, nursing diagnosis, plans/outcomes, interventions with rationales, then an evaluation. We do this for every patient we take care of. I was just curious if this is how it is once you are a registered nurse working in a hospital because to be honest I hope not! :no:

Thanks!

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That's what nursing is about but thank god the hospitals make it a lot easier for you. They usually have pre-printed care plans (clinical pathways) and all you have to do is check a bunch of boxes for your interventions. It makes it a lot easier than the school careplans. Trust me...I was worried about the same thing when I first started nursing school. But its a lot better now. :nurse:

Hi, Lolipop!

'Fraid so!! Care plans are going to be part of your existence if you work in a hosp. or nursing home, LTC etc. At our facility, ours are on the computer and are pretty well mapped out for us. Gone are the days when we had to comply our own. Now we click on this or that in the library section and it is a done deal. In school we had to do care plans from scratch, and my first years of nursing. Just one of the reasons I am glad we use computers at work (until they go down for a spell!).

Hope that helps. In the meantime, it is a good idead to get used to doing them now; it will help you in the long run.

Best of luck to you in school!:nurse:

  • Author

Thanks. It's the coming up with things on my own that I don't like so the fact that it is mapped out for me makes me feel better. I knew they were a part of nursing I was just curious if it was as intense!

  • Experts

actually, by federal law a written care plan is required in the permanent chart of every acute hospital and nursing home patient where a facility is receiving any kind of medicare/medicaid funds (that is pretty much all of them). this is one reason why nursing students are taught how to do them. care plans done as a working rn in the acute hospital are being done to document your thinking process behind the solutions to patient's nursing problems so that can become a permanent part of the patient's chart. medicare and jcaho (the organizations that do the accreditation of hospital facilities) want written proof of how the nursing staff reasoned out all those interventions they decided to use on the patient.

there are other reasons for student nurses doing care plans. it teaches them how to pull information from many different scientific disciplines as they learn to think critically and use the nursing process to problem solve. depending on what a nursing program decides to do, a student may be taught several methods of care planning since there are several types of physical presentations of a nursing care plan. also, functional health patterns which your school is requiring you to do is one of many types of assessment formats that can be utilized in collecting information about patients, but it is not the only one. it just happens to be the one your school likes to use. once you are licensed and on a job, a hospital may require you to use a different assessment format or you may be free to use one of your own choosing such as the functional systems approach or the head-to-toe assessment.

part of your yearly evaluation as a hospital rn will include appraisal of your care plan writing as per the facility policy since this is a job responsibility. your nursing school would be doing you a terrible disservice in not having you to write care plans since they would not be preparing you for the working world upon graduation.

sorry if this is bad news to you. it is, however, what makes us professional nurses.

it you are needing assistance with any aspect of putting together your care plans there is lots of help in the student forums:

Daytonite, I love reading your posts. I always manage to learn so much from them no matter what topic you are posting to.:bowingpur

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