Discussion Question: Care Plans vs Concept Mapping?

[VickyRN, MSN, DNP, RN]

Brief survey: does your program use care plans or concept mapping (or another framework)? Which would you recommend and why?

[VickyRN, MSN, DNP, RN]

We are currently using care plans, but not too satisfied. Seems like the students are just suffering through them as an annoying task, not shaping them to fit their patients (at least to our satisfaction), and not really gleaning as much from them as we would like for the time investment. We are looking into concept mapping as a promising alternative, one that perhaps would allow the student to see the "whole picture" of the patient. Concept mapping is a visual, kinesthetic, and 3-dimentional form of learning, as compared with the linear care plans. We still would retain the nursing process as a framework, just no more CP's :chuckle

For those who are interested, here are a few links explaining concept mapping:

http://www.coun.uvic.ca/learn/program/hndouts/map_ho.html

http://users.edte.utwente.nl/lanzing/cm_home.htm

Example:

[skicheryl]

I like the concept map, it's similar to the brainstorming process to me. I've also found that doing presentations with slides showing concept mapping helps the audience to understand the info. However, I don't think students would be any more accepting of concept mapping than care planning, at least at the ADN level. I agree it may be a better way for them to learn the information, if they can see the relationships/nursing process specific to a patient within the map. Presenting it in another way such as the concept mapping is always helpful to those that are visual learners. I've seen students totally stressing out over writing individualized care plans with nursing diagnosis, interventions, goals, and implementation. Anything to enable students to learn the nursing process and apply it to real life patient scenarios is always welcome. In the MSN program, I still have trouble writing goals that are measurable enough to satisfy the PhD's teaching the courses!