Please help with critical thinking questions

I agree with Destination1. Betty can't see. There is lots of objective data to support that suspicion.

Yes, she may be taking the death of her dog particularly hard. He may have become her "best friend" as she gradually withdrew from a world that she had increasing difficulty relating to other people.

my first question to you is what has this class been about? assessment? med/surg? psych? pediatrics?

when you are presented with a case study, the first thing you need to do is reduce it to a list of all the data. several things stuck out very noticeably to me.

• having trouble in school for the past three months
  
• fifth grader
  
• betty cries easily and becomes frustrated with reading
  
• friends seem to be pulling away from her
  
• teacher has had difficulty working individually with betty - why?
  
• several of her friends wave at her and she makes no response
  
• she tells you that her dog died about a month ago
  
• a tear forms in the corner of her eye when she tells you about her dog
  
• she squints
  

a. what history questions would you ask betty? (subjective information)

b. what exams would you perform? be specific. (objective information)

c. which of the two or three of the 11 gordon's functional health patterns do you think might be most likely in your nursing diagnoses? give rationale for selecting each of the 2-3 functional health patterns you selected.

if you were the school nurse, this child's teacher sent her to the school nurse for a reason. the scenario is giving conflicting information deliberately, but if you read it carefully i think there is enough information there that indicate that this child may have a vision problem. either she doesn't want to say anything about it or just doesn't know how to say it (children sometimes don't know that something is wrong).

this was only a practice question. you need to be prepared for your test. if you get something similar on a test, what will you do? how will you proceed?

follow the steps of the nursing process:

1. assessment
   
2. nursing diagnosis
   
3. planning
   
4. implementation
   
5. evaluation
   

gordon's functional needs is how you assess a person's health history. in the scenario you were given you needed to start by listing out the data. it didn't specifically ask, but could you sort the data into gordon's patterns if you had been asked to do that? do you know what is assessed in all 11 patterns? what if you are asked about physical assessment?

the next step of the process is to determine the problem. you need to separate out the abnormal data first. they are evidence of the problem(s). in nursing we label them as nursing diagnoses. does any of this sound familiar? you may be asked to demonstrate it on a test.