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How Does a Nursing Assessment Example Help You
Before we discuss how a nursing assessment example can help you, let us brief understand what nursing assessment is. The core objective a nursing assessment is to gain a thorough understanding of the health status of the patient through a collection of relevant data. The data collected is evaluated and validated before determining the nursing process to be adopted for the patient. More importantly, a nursing assessment will be the forerunner for the medical process that follows. Thus, if a nursing assessment is sloppy, it can significantly impact the medical process and therefore the results.
Nursing assessment aims at understanding the behavioral patterns of the patient, his/her strengths and ability to cop with the situation, inherent and/or potential problems in the nursing plan envisaged, and other factors that can influence the nursing process. A nursing assessment may be performed on a continuous basis depending on specific circumstances though the initial assessment will set the tone for the subsequent course of action/procedure. The internet provides nursing assessment example for a wide range of circumstances. It is important to know that depending on the goal, the assessment will cover diverse areas though students can observe a common thread running through different nursing assessment example.
Nursing assessment is generally called for when a patient needs prolonged care in instances like chronic illnesses, accident recovery or similar situations. Subjective data aiding the nursing assessment can include a series of factors such as beliefs, thoughts, sensations, perceptions and the general history of patient’s health. Objective data on the other hand are represented by physical examination of the patient, clinical/diagnostic studies, and other methods of evaluation. In some situations, it may be essential to include members of the family and/or friends to supplement the required data for an effective nursing assessment. The initial nursing assessment of a patient will be comprehensive in character and will cover various factors impacting the process. Ongoing nursing assessments are more focused to address specific situations. Since the human metabolic system is invariably interconnected, when the functioning of one organ is compromised, it can potentially trigger problems for another healthy organ. Therefore, the initial nursing assessment which is exhaustive is always used as a referral point for every ongoing assessment.
Moving on to a typical nursing assessment example, a brief account of nursing assessment for “potential for injury” will follow these steps:-
- Assessing subjective and objective data relevant to the assessment
- Nursing diagnosis
- Nursing intervention
- Evaluation
Each of the above steps in the nursing assessment example are exhaustive in nature and will help determine if the nursing assessment envisaged is most appropriate for the patient in the given circumstances. It is important that data obtained through nursing assessment should complement the medical assessment of the patient and not contradict with each other. The medical process and the nursing process should therefore work in tandem towards the common goal of providing the best possible care and relief to the patient.