educational value of care plans

[OnlinePersona]

I do care plans every week and I am not sure what the point of them are. I read and reread many care plan books and I really don't understand what the importance or rather the educational value of if is. I love the pathophysiology part of it and maybe tying the primary and secondary dx but besides that, the rest of my 15+ page care plan is just busy work for me.

What do you guys feel about the educational value of care plans?

[kbrn2002, ADN, RN]

I know it seems like a lot of busy work right now, but there really is a lot of educational value to care plans. Learning to do them and do them well will give you that solid foundation of general knowledge that you don't even know yet that you need.

Sure, as a working nurse chances are pretty good that you will never write a care plan. Chances are also 100% that the things you learn writing them now will be useful to you then.

[Esme12, ASN, BSN, RN]

Care plans each the nursing student about the diseases, What to look for, How to prioritize care......the recipe on how to care for your patient. When used properly it shows you how to care for your patient , what to look for and how to treat complications. It teaches you....what do I look for and what should I treat first.

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[nursmimi, BSN, RN]

I hated care plans, but they were necessary for learning how to think like a nurse, as others have said. I write and use careplans on a daily basis for many of my students. I'm sure that the professors dislike grading them as much as we disliked writing them. However, "busy work" would simply be something they could throw aside (write 100 times "I will play nice with others" ).

[Purple_roses]

I hate doing them too, but filling out all of the pages (mine is 26 ) helps me formulate better nursing diagnoses. It just does. It reminds me of what the big issues were for that particular patient. And it also reminds me to think like a nurse. For instance, if I notice that my patient has a Risk for Aspiration diagnosis, what am I going to do about that? It does no good to simply document that. It also reminds me of what I need to work on. For my first care plan, there were some things that I just flat out forgot to assess. Doing them over and over again engrains all that assessment info into my personal nursing process. Again, I hate them. They take up so much time. But I can honestly say that I think much more like a nurse now than I did at the beginning of the semester.

[vintagemother, BSN, CNA, LVN, RN]

I'm a nerd. I love care plans. I often think of ESME's posts on care plans, while writing them for school, or when I was doing them as part of my job as a nurse.

I do think sometimes, school makes them more complicated than they need to be. Indeed, at my current school, we have to pick a nursing diagnosis from a list and then find symptoms that correlate.

This is backwards, I think; based on my understanding and ESMEs posts on the subject.

Nursing care plans should be our guides to help us take care of the pt, In a pragmatic, methodical manner.