Published May 21, 2012
I will be a nurse
8 Posts
Okay so I am working on a case study, and I am stuck on this question. Discuss the pathophysiology or Chronic renal failure and how it can progress to acute renal failure. Past medical Hx: hypertension, CHF, and a fib. I'm just confused how chronic can progress to acute I thought it was the other way around?? Any input or resources where I can look would be greatly appreciated!! :)
Thank you
Esme12, ASN, BSN, RN
20,908 Posts
welcome to an! the largest online nursing community.
we are happy to help you in your homework but we will not do it for you. we need to know what you a have so far. what semester are you? even if you are way off base we will direct and guide you to the right answers. part of the process to becoming a good nurse is the developing of those "critical thinking" skill that are so vital to the care of our patients. we are frequently presented with a scenario and have to use those skill to find how to best care for our patients or assisit the md in finding the root causes. is this the same patient i have helped on before?
ok...first......let the patient drive your diagnosis/case study. what is your assessment? is the the patient having pain? are they having difficulty with adls? what teaching do they need? what does the patient need? what is the most important to them now? for the nursing diagnosis....... not try to fit the patient to the diagnosis you found first. you need to know the pathophysiology of your disease process. you need to assess your patient, collect data then find a diagnosis. let the patient data drive the diagnosis.
the medical diagnosis is the disease itself. it is what the patient has not necessarily what the patient needs. the nursing diagnosis is what are you going to do about it, what are you going to look for, and what do you need to do/look for first.
care plans /case studies when you are in school are teaching you what you need to do to actually look for, what you need to do to intervene and improve for the patient to be well and return to their previous level of life or to make them the best you you can be. it is trying to teach you how to think like a nurse.
think of the care plan as a recipe to caring for your patient. your plan of how you are going to care for them. how you are going to care for them. what you want to happen as a result of your caring for them. what would you like to see for them in the future, even if that goal is that you don't want them to become worse, maintain the same, or even to have a peaceful pain free death.
from a very wise an contributor daytonite.......make sure you follow these steps first and in order and let the patient drive your diagnosis not try to fit the patient to the diagnosis you found first.
every single nursing diagnosis has its own set of symptoms, or defining characteristics. they are listed in the nanda taxonomy and in many of the current nursing care plan books that are currently on the market that include nursing diagnosis information. you need to have access to these books when you are working on care plans. there are currently 188 nursing diagnoses that nanda has defined and given related factors and defining characteristics for. what you need to do is get this information to help you in writing care plans so you diagnose your patients correctly.
don't focus your efforts on the nursing diagnoses when you should be focusing on the assessment and the patients abnormal data that you collected. these will become their symptoms, or what nanda calls defining characteristics.
here are the steps of the nursing process and what you should be doing in each step when you are doing a written care plan:
a dear an contributor daytonite always had the best advice.......check out this link.
https://allnurses.com/nursing-student...is-290260.html
so, what is your assessment on this patient. what are the patients complaints? what are the labs? what are the vitals? is this a real patient? what is this patients story? many chronic diseases have "acute" episodes like the heart failure patient that has eposodes fo failure and puilmonary edema. not all "chronic" renal failure patients are on dialysis.
i need more information to help you!
Looking at the information I gave you on the 14th.....the answer is there. Did you register for medscape? The information there is very reliable and a good/approved source for you.
Someone can have long with standing renal insufficiency making it a chronic illness and have an acute episode that will put them into renal failure that can be reversed....or may end up being the straw that broke the camel's back and becomes failure instead of insufficiency.
Let me google that for you