Please help - nursing diagnosis

[mimibear]

I am about to beat my head with my book - please help. I need to write a diagnosis for a self care deficit: bathing/hygiene. My pt is OOB with assistance, admitted for chf, htn, mi, and cellulitis. Pt is elderly and morbidly obese, and uses a walker to get around.

So far I have

Self-care deficit: bathing/hygiene related to weakness, tiredness, pain, use of walker, medications but what is my aeb???

Thank you so much for your help!!

[Daytonite, BSN, RN]

Your AEBs are the patient's symptoms or observations about him/her that you made (and, I suspect, didn't write down). You can use weakness, tiredness, pain, musculoskeletal impairment (instead of uses walker) and perceptual/cognitive impairment (because of being on medications) as "related to" or causes of the self-care deficit. Your AEB items are going to be things like:

• unable to hold washcloth to wash self
  
• unable to stand at sink to fill water basin and still use cane

These are all examples of things that you would have found while observing and assessing the patient. You may not have thought to write these things down when you were actually doing an assessment of the patient. Now is as good a time as any. Picture in your mind the steps the person would have to go through to bathe or dress himself/herself. What little things can't he/she do to get a complete bath done? Or, to brush his/her teeth? Or, to wipe himself/herself after a BM? Those will be your AEBs. Write them down. They will also become the things you will provide nursing interventions for.