Care Plans - What's their purpose? - What do you think of them?

Nursing Students General Students

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I saw a nursing student and her instructor reviewing a care plan today and she was reviewing something about wording of the care plan and it reminded how frustrating nursing education can be and how mixed up it can seem to be sometimes!!!

At my school, anyway, a care plan for something as post-anesthesia nausea would be grilled for the wording of the nursing diagnoses, the specific wording of the nursing interventions and goals.... to make sure that we were using impractical "nurse speak" as opposed to - oh no! - referring to a medical condition directly (eg pt constipated, possibly d/t medication side effect, keep hydrated, adm laxative as ordered, etc). Students should ideally be able to rattle off quickly the what's and why's. I think the nitpicky round-about descriptions required in nursing school make simple concepts more confusing... and end up wasting the valuable time of students.

hi to everyone im cathy a student nurse and im a new user in this forum. i wanna know some tips in making a nursing care plan?? thank you. hope someone will answer me.

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Care plans were left over from the days when you would spend a week or more in the hospital just for an appendectomy.

They were originally designed for longer-term stays...so that is why we students find them difficult to do for patients who can be out the door in 5 days following a heart surgery.

As much as I hate them, they do help. It forces me to prioritize the nursing Dx and to really focus on what am I going to do that is going to help the patient in relation to what they are in the hospital for.

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Specializes in Acute Care Psych, DNP Student.
Care plans were left over from the days when you would spend a week or more in the hospital just for an appendectomy.

They were originally designed for longer-term stays...so that is why we students find them difficult to do for patients who can be out the door in 5 days following a heart surgery.

As much as I hate them, they do help. It forces me to prioritize the nursing Dx and to really focus on what am I going to do that is going to help the patient in relation to what they are in the hospital for.

I don't understand what length of stay has to do with care plan relevance? The other day I was in the ED, and I was running interventions and rationales through my mind without realizing it.

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Specializes in Vascular Access Nurse.
i don't understand what length of stay has to do with care plan relevance? the other day i was in the ed, and i was running interventions and rationales through my mind without realizing it.

i've been in nursing for about 20 years (lpn since 1989 and will graduate in may 09 with my gn..hopefully rn soon after that!)....and i can honestly say that i've never used a care plan to actually take care of the pt. i suppose it's a nice outline for newer nurses to remember the things they need to check (bs, edema, lung sounds, etc) and chart on, but most of us do that by instinct. sure, i think of problems, goals and interventions all of the time, but not in that paper format. pretty much all of the care plans at the hospital i'm at are "cookie cutter"...potential for pain, injury, altered mental status, ineffective gas exchange, etc etc etc. those are things i address anyway. again, perhaps it's a nice checklist for some, but it's redundant to me.:twocents:

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Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.
hi to everyone im cathy a student nurse and im a new user in this forum. i wanna know some tips in making a nursing care plan?? thank you. hope someone will answer me.

this thread is a general discussion about the purpose of care plans. for information on the actual construction of care plans go to this thread:

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Specializes in Medical Surgical & Behavioral Health.

As a student who get's how to do the care plans and assists many of the other students who mostly whine about having to do one... I want to say thank you to the instructor who shared why they do the care plans.

My only question now is, why do instructors vary so much in what they want to see on a care plan? I am in my 2nd semester and writing care plans for community health promotion and elderly care and each instructor has a different format and requirement as to what information they want in the care plans.

We learned in the first semester yet another way to do the care plans, and when I was in my 1st semester at another school before I transferred, yet another way to format a care plan.

just something I have noticed in 3 semesters

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Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.
As a student who get's how to do the care plans and assists many of the other students who mostly whine about having to do one... I want to say thank you to the instructor who shared why they do the care plans.

My only question now is, why do instructors vary so much in what they want to see on a care plan? I am in my 2nd semester and writing care plans for community health promotion and elderly care and each instructor has a different format and requirement as to what information they want in the care plans.

We learned in the first semester yet another way to do the care plans, and when I was in my 1st semester at another school before I transferred, yet another way to format a care plan.

just something I have noticed in 3 semesters

I'm not being mean, but if you are having difficulty rolling with the differences in the formats required by the different instructors for the care plans they want you to present, then you don't "get" how care plans are done. When you "get" how care plans are done you can write them up in any format asked of you. "Getting" them means you understand the nursing process (the problem solving method), how to apply it and how to work with the tools provided to you.

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Well I will be starting in Jan '09 and am really looking forward to it. I read all the threads so that I can get different view points of whats in store. Very helpful. Thanks!!!

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Specializes in Vascular Access Nurse.
i'm not being mean, but if you are having difficulty rolling with the differences in the formats required by the different instructors for the care plans they want you to present, then you don't "get" how care plans are done. when you "get" how care plans are done you can write them up in any format asked of you. "getting" them means you understand the nursing process (the problem solving method), how to apply it and how to work with the tools provided to you.

oh gosh, i disagree. i write care plans for a living for a snf, and still have trouble figuring out which instructor wants what!! some just don't like the way we word something, while the other insists that it's worded that way. it's not necessarily the format, but their personal preference. one instructor might like "potential for impaired skin integrity r/t decreased mobility" while the other insists on "potential for skin breakdown r/t diminished activity." i definitely "get" how to write a care plan, but don't "get" why 4 instructors in the same program insist on different wording, that means the sam thing! thankfully, i'm only one semester away from graduation....and very happy that we don't have to write care plans for school anymore! :yeah:

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Specializes in Critical Care-Neuro/Trauma ICU.

Here's my opinion on Care Plans...I'm not sure how it is at other schools...but all of my care plans were graded by my clinical instructor. She taught me how to write them and I was graded based on her evaluation. However when I sat down to take my Fundamentals final this morning, there was a 10pt question at the end of the test...had to write out a care plan. Before the test my teacher explained her way of grading which was TOTALLY different than the way my clinical instructor had been teaching us...I just think it's BS...they should have had some kind of uniform grading criteria...

And yes I hate writing them just like everyone else...I don't have a hard time with them...it's just MORE paperwork that has to be done for clinical:banghead:

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Care plans suck! They are supposed to serve a purpose, but geeze.........not really. The kind I have to do are like 16 pages long and take about 14 hours to write. I learn nothing from it cause I'm in such a rush to write these which is nothing more than copying things right from the book:banghead:. I could think of so many other things students could be doing.

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Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.
Care plans suck! They are supposed to serve a purpose, but geeze.........not really. The kind I have to do are like 16 pages long and take about 14 hours to write. I learn nothing from it cause I'm in such a rush to write these which is nothing more than copying things right from the book:banghead:. I could think of so many other things students could be doing.

In school, care plans are pretty much like term papers, but one of their purposes is to teach you how to think critically. Another purpose is to teach you to learn how to find information. Critical thinking is something I see you struggling with. Copying things from a book to complete a care plan is not helping you to think independently and consider other ideas. Take a few chances and challenge yourself to explore possibilities beyond what the care plan books have to offer once in a while. Expand what you think you know because there is always something new to learn. There is no more important thing you need to learn in RN training than how to think critically in order to solve problems. Your entire career as an RN will revolve around management and solutions to patient problems. Trust me. I spent 30 years at it.

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