Stages of the Nursing: The five stages of the nursing process are assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation, and evaluation. This process makes sure that the patient is healthy and being cared for to the best of your ability! Let’s go over each of these stages in detail so you know what to do when your patients need nursing care! Read more about the scope of nursing
Assessment Stages of the Nursing:
Before a nurse can provide a patient with any care, he or she needs to conduct an assessment. This includes getting all relevant information from a patient’s medical history and/or chart and conducting an initial examination. Nurses use various tools during assessments, including scales, stethoscopes, thermometers, blood pressure cuffs, and tongue depressors. After taking vital signs and recording them in a chart or software program like EMR (electronic medical records), nurses evaluate their findings by listening to their patients’ hearts and lungs for abnormalities, checking pulses, and observing skin color changes.
Diagnosis (Stages of the Nursing):
The first stage of the nursing process is identifying what your client needs. This can be as simple as asking, What’s wrong? Or it might involve more diagnostics, such as asking about symptoms and conducting lab tests. However you go about it, diagnosis is how you pinpoint what’s wrong with your client and plan treatment for them. Without a diagnosis, treatment is useless and ineffective. Take time to diagnose properly—don’t rush it! Remember that a correct diagnosis leads to proper care, which leads to better health outcomes overall.
Planning:
This stage is all about planning. Nurses will look at what resources are available to them, find out what they need to provide, plan out how they’re going to use those resources, and give some thought as to how they’re going to go about carrying it all out. When dealing with any type of illness, planning is especially important because it can have a direct impact on someone’s recovery. For example, if a patient has diabetes and their diet needs are slightly off from normal; planning is necessary in order for patients to recover and avoid additional complications in their lives. If a nurse were not able to plan for situations like these, patients could become ill again or never truly recover and maybe be stuck living with complications for their entire life.
Implementation:
The implementation stage is often a whirlwind of activity. The healthcare team may be in and out of your home, providing many services at once. You may feel like you need to act as a guide for them, helping them keep track of all that needs to get done. In fact, if you’re unfamiliar with medical equipment and services involved in care, it can be difficult to remember everything you need from one day to another. It can help to develop a list (see below) so that you can consistently request what you need or prepare ahead of time. Or have someone else keep track on your behalf (such as a spouse or another loved one).
Evaluation:
The first stage in most nursing interventions is evaluation. This means gathering pertinent data about your patient’s needs and determining whether or not it falls under your scope of practice. For example, you may perform a head-to-toe assessment to determine your patient’s overall state of health, or simply conduct a quick review of his or her medical history and vital signs to gather preliminary information. Be sure to record all results in your medical chart so you can refer back to them later on during treatment.