How does Nursing Care Plan Used by Nurses ?

A nursing care plan provides an idea about the nursing care to be provided to a patient. It is the actions that are performed by the nurses to resolve the problem that are seen in the assessment. It guides the nurses on what sort of care is to be provided to the patient and to check whether those actions are carried out properly or not. Nursing care plans give nurses tracking of patients’ progress and helps to provide appropriate treatment. Because nurses work with multiple patients in a day and cannot always memorize the condition of each patient, the care plan helps nurses to quickly understand the patient's history, diagnosis, and treatment plan.

Care plans are thorough documents that include an initial condition of the patient, medical progress and diagnosis, recovery, treatment plans, and the patient’s response to treatment (whether it is deteriorating or getting better). Because multiple nurses will work with the same patient, the care plan needs to be easily understandable and thorough so that the other nurse can continue the work without any delay or difficulties. The patient’s condition can change in a matter of time and care plans must be assessed so as to provide the latest information about the patient.

A care plan offers a holistic approach to patient care and continuously changes until the patient’s stay in the medical facility.
The nursing care plan may consists various sorts of data that support the diagnosis, certain goals to be achieved and the deadlines at which the certain work is to be completed. Nurses need to be very efficient with their care plans.

Nursing care plans deal with actions which are necessary to solve or minimize the existing problem. It should be such that all the needs of the patient should be well assessed.

A nursing plan can be formulated on a tabular form where the daily data are stored in a table which contains the information like assessment, diagnosis, inference, planning, intervention, rationale, evaluation. An effective care plan includes important patient information and offers specific, measurable goals for treatment.

Due to the nursing shortage, the number of nurses is low due to which, many tools exist to help nurses efficiently prepare care plans. Nursing care plans resources include care plan software, websites, and books which help nurses prepare the care plan easily. By the use of these tools the error is minimized and time is saved.

If you want to learn more about nursing education, David has also written helpful articles about LPN Training and
LPN to RN Program
on his website.
Author: David Alen