Need help with UTI care plan

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Hello. I am doing a nursing care plan for a UTI patient. Any advise

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Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.

You need to look at the pathophysiology of sepsis as well as urinary tract infection. Sepsis is a serious and potentially life-threatening condition. While UTI's are one cause of sepsis, they are not the only cause. The article I've listed below gives a huge laundry list of infections that can lead to sepsis. Any pre-existing infection in the body can become septic, not just UTI's.

I myself, spent 11 days in the hospital recently on IV antibiotics for a post-surgical septic infection following bowel surgery and I would not consider myself to be elderly nor the surgeon incompetent. It just happened. I woke up one morning feeling terrible, had a fever of 102 and the doctor found I had a WBC count of 30,000 which is what landed my butt in the hospital! This was 30 days after my surgery and up to that point I had been feeling great. It took them five days to find the source of the infection. My elderly mother was hospitalized twice with urosepsis. Each time she had no evidence of the UTI before it had gone septic. Her only symptoms were an elevated fever and she became obtunded (very diminished level of consciousness). The sepsis was treated first when her white count was found elevated. The docs then started hunting down possible sources of an infection: blood cultures were taken, urine was cultured, x-ray of the lungs was done, stool cultures were ordered and then the UTI found incidentally.

People die of infections that have gone septic. I believe that this is what happened with Christopher Reeve and Gene Roddenberry. It has to do with the bacteria getting into the general circulation and the immune system not being able to cope.

http://www.emedicine.com/med/topic3163.htm - Bacterial Sepsis

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Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.
hello. i am doing a nursing care plan for a uti patient. any advise

hi, studentrnjgonzalez and welcome to allnurses! :welcome:

in doing any care plan you should follow the nursing process. a care plan ultimately begins with the assessment (step #1 of the nursing process) that you perform. this includes the review you made of the patient's medical record and the physical examination you did on the patient. from that information you list out everything you found that was abnormal. this brings you to step #2 of the nursing process. these abnormal assessment items can now be called the patient's symptoms. these are the things you are going to be addressing in your care plan. nanda (north american nursing diagnosis association) calls these symptoms defining characteristics. to assign any nursing diagnoses to your patient, his/her defining characteristics must match with the defining characteristics for the nursing diagnoses you will end up using. every nursing diagnosis has a unique list of defining characteristics just like every medical diagnosis has a unique list of symptoms. since you are new at doing this, you will need a nursing diagnosis or care plan reference of some sort to help you with this. even though you assign one or more nursing diagnoses to the patient, your goals and nursing interventions are still, ultimately, aimed at those abnormal assessment items (symptoms, defining characteristics) that you initially found when assessing your patient.

there are two threads on the student forums that you can review the posts on to help you with writing care plans:

if you are still in need of help, start a new thread in the nursing student assistance forum where i will see it and i will give you more help with this.

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I want to personally thank everyone who has helped me on the Nursing care plan. We (me and my clinical partner) got an Pass thanx to all of the feedback we recieved here. May God bless you all.

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So can the infection from the UTI get into the bloodstream and cause sepsis? Is it that if had lingered awhile causing such damage to the lining of the urinary tract that the blood could get infected causing sepsis? Are the elderly more likely to get sepsis from a UTI than younger folks because of delayed treatment due to the symptoms being masked or unnoticed (d/t other health concerns, confusion, etc)? Or maybe because they are more likely to already have compromised health making sepsis more likely than in a younger patient with UTI?

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Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.
So can the infection from the UTI get into the bloodstream and cause sepsis? Is it that if had lingered awhile causing such damage to the lining of the urinary tract that the blood could get infected causing sepsis? Are the elderly more likely to get sepsis from a UTI than younger folks because of delayed treatment due to the symptoms being masked or unnoticed (d/t other health concerns, confusion, etc)? Or maybe because they are more likely to already have compromised health making sepsis more likely than in a younger patient with UTI?

Yes to all your questions. There is also an issue of a compromised immune system as well. There are a lot of factors that can get involved. Any infection anywhere in the body can become septic. Sepsis can become a life-threatening and critical situation.

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Kind of rekindling an old thread - my question is this: when developing a nursing dx for someone with a uti, would you use a 'risk for infection' dx when the infection already exists? The reason I ask is because I would assume no, but have seen repeated examples to the contrary while searching the net. What do you think?

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