The nursing care plan

Intent: The purpose of the assessment is to enable students to apply clinical reasoning and critical thinking to justify appropriate nursing actions and rationales when developing a nursing care plan.

Objective(s): This assessment task addresses subject learning objective(s): A, B, C, D and E This assessment task contributes to the development of graduate attribute(s):

Weight: 40%

Word count – 1800-word limit +/- 10%, excluding references (500 – 600 words per Nursing Diagnosis)

Task: This assessment is the development of a Nursing Care Plan Choose one of the case studies from the tutorial and lab sessions in the Medical Surgical Nursing subject and develop a nursing care plan.

The nursing care plan will include:

Identification of three nursing diagnosis from the case study that Registered Nurses can address. You may include ‘Actual’ or ‘Risk’ nursing diagnosis (please refer to the Nursing Diagnosis definition on page 2 of these guidelines).

For each nursing diagnosis:

• Identify a person-centred goal of care

• Three nursing actions

• Clear rationale for each nursing action

• Evaluation strategies to determine the effectiveness of nursing actions

The goals, nursing actions, rationale and evaluation strategies must be supported with high quality current literature where appropriate. For example: text books, peer-reviewed journal articles, health policy documents, government reports. Students need to demonstrate their ability to write clearly and succinctly to reflect their understanding. Accurate referencing is expected, poor referencing will result in loss of marks. Marks may be deducted if the assessment is not within the word limit.

Nursing diagnosis definition:

A nursing diagnosis is a problem that becomes apparent following a thorough and systematic interpretation of subjective and objective data. An actual nursing diagnosis consists of the person’s problem, the related aetiology (causal relationship between a problem and its related or risk factors) and supporting evidence/cues. For example: Dehydration related to post-operative nausea and vomiting evidenced by dry mucous membranes, oliguria, poor skin turgor, hypotension and tachycardia. A risk nursing diagnosis is a clinical judgment about a potential problem where the presence of risk factors indicates that a problem may develop unless nurses intervene appropriately. A risk diagnosis is written in two parts and does not include signs and symptoms.