The nursing care planning process is an important aid in the treatment of patients. In turn, it creates a systematic care plan approach that, with the inclusion of other health professionals, allows patients the best path to full fitness. When used effectively, the nursing planning process offers many benefits to the healthcare environment:
- It is patient-centered, helping to ensure that your patient’s health problems and your response to them are the primary focus of care.
- It allows you to individualize care for each individual patient.
- It promotes patient involvement in their care, encourages independence and compliance, and gives the patient a greater sense of control—important factors in a positive health outcome. (See Putting the ‘P’ in the schedule.)
- It improves communication by providing you and other nurses with a summary of the patient’s recognized problems or needs so everyone is working toward the same goals.
- Promotes accountability for nursing activities, which in turn promotes quality assurance and delivery of quality health care.
- Promotes critical thinking, decision making, and problem solving for the benefit of health care delivery.
- It focuses on results and encourages evaluation of results.
- Minimize errors and omissions in care planning.
Basis for the nursing care planning process The nursing care planning process is based on the scientific method of problem solving, which implies:
- indicating the problem you observed
- formulate a hypothesis about the solution of the problem (‘if… then’ statements)
- development of a method to test the hypothesis
- collect test data
- analyzing the data
- draw conclusions about the hypothesis.
a scientific fact Most people use the scientific method instinctively, without realizing that they are doing it. Simply choosing which pair of shoes best complements your favorite outfit is an exercise in the scientific method. So if you are familiar with the scientific process, the nursing planning process is probably familiar to you. Steps of the nursing process. The nursing planning process comprises five steps:
- evaluation
- nursing diagnosis
- planning
- implementation
- assessment
Following these steps systematically in the order shown here allows you to organize and prioritize patient care in the order it is needed, especially critical for the novice nursing student. It also helps ensure that you don’t omit or overlook important patient information. When used correctly, the nursing planning process ensures that the plan of care is revised when new issues arise or patient outcomes are not achieved. It also allows the nursing care plan to be interrupted when patient outcomes have been achieved.
