Care Plans

I am gonna be honest. This has been one of the most difficult things for me! I had really strict instructors, and they almost had to be perfect in order to get an S on the care plan. It very time consuming. It took me like 4-6 hours to write one. Ours had to be very detailed though. I would say get a care plan book to help you with them. Amazon has some good ones. Mine were usually 15 pages long. Like I said though, our teacher's were very strict on ours! It's very time consuming but it helps you with the critical thinking process when you are taking care of a patient! Good luck!

Mine were usually 15 pages long.

Holy cow...15 pages!? We have to create a "care map" on a sheet of paper. Some people use 8.5x11, a lot of us use 11x14. Some students create them on their computer; I prefer a pencil and colored markers. They're not difficult (at least I don't think so), just VERY time consuming.

Here is a template of what we are expected to do the night before clinical

Care plan template.docx

Holy cow...15 pages!? We have to create a "care map" on a sheet of paper. Some people use 8.5x11, a lot of us use 11x14. Some students create them on their computer; I prefer a pencil and colored markers. They're not difficult (at least I don't think so), just VERY time consuming.

Yes... If you only knew how picky my instructors were...

I'm also nervous about writing care plans. They seem so involved and so time consuming. I've never heard one person say "care pans aren't that bad" let alone someone saying they actually like care plans. I guess I'll just have to wait and see for myself.

I guess am one of those lucky people that care plans seem easy for me. I was given a care plan book which has helped, but I find that I barely use it. Of course my first one was difficult because it was new and it took me hours to do it, but once I got the hang of it, maybe takes me 45 minutes to complete 3. I look at my patient and why they are in the hospital and what needs to me taken care of and what they might be at risk for. The biggest thing is making a care plan for your individual patient, I find that this is where a lot of people mess up. We are given a very thick clinical pack to complete before clinical that can be time consuming if you have a very sick patient. I can usually have everything finished in about 1 1/2 hours.

We had to write up a patho on every single problem they currently had and what they had in the past. We have to write up every abnormal lab value since they were admitted. Any tests that were done and state what they found. We had to have 4 nursing dx with 4 interventions. We had tell the patient's history and what brought them here. Also, on every single med including PRN, we had to put the side effects, whether it should be diluted or not, how many minutes you give it over and what the outcome of that drug should be. I had usually 10 meds or more. You think about how lengthy that can get!! I usually get the hardest clinical instructors that are super picky

For me, care plans were quite simple (not necessarily easy) for me to do. My clinical instructor wasn't an APA nazi like most are, probably because we were 1st semester, but she focused more on the content and are ADPIE stuff. Care plans were just SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO time consuming! It wasn't hard, it just took forever to do! It was straightforward because they gave us a template and all you had to do was follow it exactly with APA format, but it's just so tedious. My care plan was somewhere between 10-15 pages. The 2nd half of our first semester had incorporated "concept maps" where it was basically a 1 page care plan added on but with a summary/main points of the patient. That was quite tough, but once my instructor showed me how to do it, it wasn't all too bad.

Key thing is, work on your critical thinking skills and think beyond the box so you can connect the dots. That's what care plans really are. Don't forget to START EARLY! I made the mistake of thinking my 2nd care plan would be easy and did it the night before. That didn't go so well......

For us care plans are not very excessive. We're given a template (which actually changed between 1st and 2nd semester...talk about continuity...). I've done three that have been graded and a rough one for each of my patients in the hospital. Graded ones took about an hour and were 3-4 pages (gathering the data is what takes forever). The ones I made for my essentially time management during clinical took maybe 15-20 minutes and about a page and I used my own format. Those were also almost always modified after bedside report when the patient's condition changed in the 10 hours since I had been in to gather info.

The minute I stopped thinking of care plans as homework and a waste of time, is the point where they started helping me. They are complex, but they are framing the way that you think. I am getting to the point where I can do them in my head!

My school gave us care plans that we had to fill out and I used my med surg book and used their care plans out of there.

I actually love writing care plans. They help you to understand your patient in the way nurses actually do. Mine were usually about 2 pages, but it was so interesting to me. When we got to clinicals, the charting system for our patients had the nurses priority interventions and it showed me that careplans are really used, just not in the formal way we have to write them.