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Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Nursing Care Plan

I'm finishing up my care plan for my current rotation - psychiatry. I'm quite pleased to be able to say that writing these plans is becoming much easier. Maybe it helps that my first career involved much writing, but knowing which nursing diagnoses to choose for my patients is also coming much easier. It's actually fun to write these (I know, I'm weird).


It'll be interesting to see what the difference is between nursing school and real nursing, next year. These care plans are a great idea in principle, but are they really used across the board in nursing practice?  I somehow doubt that greatly. I can see them being developed and used in certain areas of nursing, such as maybe home nursing or rehab, but on a medical floor or even in psychiatry, I must say I rather doubt it.


Probably much of what we're currently learning will be nice to know, but not applicable to the realities of the work day. I love the ideas of giving "culturally competent care" and writing down goals that are "patient driven" so as to have maximum participation on the patient's part. Ideally, I sincerely hope to be able to include elements of such ideas in my daily practice, and I will really try, as I do see the benefits, but it remains to be seen to what extent such ideas can really be incorporated into practice.


And don't even get me started on nursing theories -- especially the grand theories!  I can hypothetically see the usefulness and how I could apply middle range theories and lower theories in my work. However, that being said, I do appreciate the work and thought and effort that the early nursing theorists, back in the 1960s and 1970s did, which helped advance nursing into a true profession, and not just a non-thinking role as "handmaiden to the physician".


I give the early theorists full credit and gratitude for that, because if nursing was today like it was 50 years ago, I most certainly would have stuck it out in my first career, guaranteed!  Nursing has come a long way in the past few decades, and I look forward to seeing how much further it will advance in my lifetime.


But I will still reserve the right to snicker at Roger's prediction that nurses will become "astraunettes" in the future, doing nursing practice in outer space.  But again, I give her full credit for her many ideas and thoughts -- think big or go home. She definitely thought big.


Back to my care plan and hopefully I can manage a short run this morning, before my afternoon class.


Life is good.  And Spring Break is next week, which is great.




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