NSG 4076 Week 8 Journal – Bi-weekly Practicum Journaling

Throughout this week, I have been reading more about care and nursing diagnosis, and I have appreciated the contribution these two concepts make to the nursing profession. A care plan is considered to be an important tool for nurses caring for their patients. In developing a care plan, nurses ought to have great skills in many areas as this would help them formulate a nursing diagnosis based on the patient’s situation and health. As noted by Kaashoek (2000), nurses get motivated in their work with nursing diagnoses as they help clarify the individual needs of the patient. A practical nursing diagnosis helps nurses see a patient from a more holistic perspective, facilitating the decision of specific nursing interventions. The use of nursing diagnoses can lead to greater quality and patient safety and may also increase nurse’s awareness of nursing and strengthen their professional role. Therefore, the process that forms the basis for a work leading to the formulation of a nursing diagnosis is therefore of great interest.

According to Kaashoek (2000), nursing diagnoses also help promote the ability to foster client-centered care and improve nursing care to the right standards of practice. Nursing diagnostics allow specific assessments of nursing problems and provide the basis for nursing interventions. Nursing diagnoses influence all professional practice elements that are basic for patient classification systems (Staub, 2001). Through a clear nursing diagnosis, a nurse can develop an effective care plan for a patient. By their very nature, care plans document every aspect of the patient’s care, from assessment to diagnosis, planned interventions, outcomes, and evaluation. Without the “road map” that the nursing care plans provide, certain important issues are likely to be neglected. Because the care plans are holistic in their focus, they take into account all aspects of the patients, their families, their community experiences, and responses to actual or potential health problems and life processes (Al-Tannir et al., 2017). The nursing care plan’s documentation and evaluation process allows nurses to take stock of their plan and determine if it produced the predicted outcome or if it didn’t work as intended.

Research suggests that problem-solving and creating a goal and a feasible action plan through a care plan improve outcomes for diabetes, weight loss, and depression. We call this a collaborative care plan. Effective problem-solving emphasizes patient-centeredness and prevents the clinician from imposing goals and plans on the patient. “Building a collaborative care plan.” Many studies worldwide have described the importance of and benefits offered by patient engagement and its effect on the safety and quality of healthcare. The benefits include improved patient adherence to care plans, better clinical outcomes, increased satisfaction, reductions in healthcare costs due to reduced hospitalization, decreased frequency of untoward outcomes, and fewer doctor visits (Al-Tannir et al., 2017).