clinical narrative?

diane227, LPN, RN · Nov 10, 2009

What is a clinical narrative? This is a new term for me.

diane227, LPN, RN · Nov 10, 2009

I found it on the internet and it sounds like the following. This goes by several other names in the hospital. Occurrence reports, critical incident stress debriefing, and one other for when you have a major incident that has to be reported to the state. It is basically a time when you look at a situation and analyze the who, what, when, where, and how of a situation and try to determine how/ what you could have done to change the outcome and what improvements need to be made.

During critical incident stress debriefing it would be giving staff the time to ventilate about the situation, what was done right, what could have been better and to help staff cope with the actions taken and the outcome.

Other times, for example if you have a psych patient die while on a psych unit (this is a reportable incident to the state, no matter what state you live in) you have to do a sentinel event. This is required by law and by JCAHO. Sentinel events are events such as a fall which results in death, death on a psych unit, operations on the wrong side of the body, instruments left in the body, etc.

This is the only thing that I can think of that they may be referring to. In your evaluation process your manager might ask you to talk about a situation that was stressful for you and how you handled it and a situation where you felt that you did an outstanding job.

I SO WISH the nursing school would use the same language as what we use in the real world. I may be totally wrong here. This may not be what they are looking for at all.