The local renal satellite services offer patients treatment of haemodialysis 3 times a week. This is a treatment for patients whose kidneys have failed and it is to remove toxins and waste from the blood (Levy et al 2009). Patients are often unwell when they attend the unit and also have other issues that affect their health. These are linked either to their kidney failure, or to other co-morbidities. Cardiac problems often become a major complication for dialysis patients (Harnett et al). This assignment will be discussing a patient who attended the dialysis unit feeling unwell on arrival. It will cover the initial assessment of the patient and the challenges faced in transferring them to the main renal unit inpatients ward. It will also …show more content…
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Congestive Heart Failure is when the heart's pumping power is weaker than normal. It does not mean the heart has stopped working. The blood moves through the heart and body at a slower rate, and pressure in the heart increases. This means; the heart cannot pump enough oxygen and nutrients to meet the body's needs. The chambers of the heart respond by stretching to hold more blood to pump through the body or by becoming more stiff and thickened. This only keeps the blood moving for a short while. The heart muscle walls weaken and are unable to pump as strongly. This makes the kidneys respond by causing the body to retain fluid and sodium. When the body builds up with fluids, it becomes congested. Many conditions can cause heart failure, and they are Coronary artery disease, Heart attack, Cardiomyopathy, and conditions that overwork the heart.
Thirty minutes before evening shift change and you receive the call. A new admission is in route to your facility. The patient is reported to be of high acuity, requires intravenous antibiotics, and has a diagnosis of chronic pain. In some health care settings this would be considered a typical new patient admission. However, for rural long-term care facilities there is potential for considerable complications. In a setting where registered nurses are only required to be in the facility eight hours within a twenty-four hour time frame, significant complications can arise during admissions that require certain specialty care specific to the RN. Ineffective discharge planning between any health care settings can be detrimental to patient care.
The aim of this essay is to discuss the nature of illness and dependence in relation to the issues that the nurse should take into account when providing evidence-based care. The issues that will be analysed are the nursing process and nursing models, the implications of nursing technology on the nurse, the patient and their family, the psychological issues for the patient and their family, the consequences of disability and chronic illness and the importance of patient-centred nursing. These issues will be discussed, for the most part, in relation to the patient care received by patients admitted to a ‘high tech’ area. The ‘high tech’ area will be, on the whole, focused in a medical high dependency unit in a local general hospital.
Without proper working kidneys, blood pressure can rise, body fluids accumulate and red blood cell count can decrease. Usually kidney problems occur from disease, conditions and disorders. Disease can come from damage to nephrons, which help filter the blood. Infections can travel from the bladder up to the kidneys. Kidney cancers, kidney stones, cysts and injury all can damage a kidney. Without properly working kidneys, our heart, lungs and brain, as well as other organs are put in danger. (Capicchiano 2013) Kidney dialysis is not always a permanent need; sometimes it is needed for a short time. Kidney dialysis can occur in many places, the hospital, a home or in a center. Often people return to work after dialysis, unless their job involves strenuous activity such as heavy lifting or digging. (Lewin, 2010)
Each day we are faced with making decisions regarding the plan of care and discharge of a patient based on the number of days an insurance company allows to treat the patient. Most times the days allowed are less than what is required to assist the patient back to their prior level of function and ability to safely return home. This causes an internal struggle for the provider and can lead to easily accepting what the insurance company allows even though it is not always best for the patient. Typically, we follow the rule of always doing what is right, which could mean that we keep the patient on the unit longer than the insurance will provide payment.
Acute Renal Failure is a difficult sickness that affects millions of people all over the world the only thing oneself can do is to live a happy stress free life with a healthy diet and to always live each day as if it was the last day of their life.
This piece of work will be based on the pre-assessment process that patients go through on arrival to an endoscopy unit in which I was placed during my second year studying Adult Diploma Nursing. I will explore one patient’s holistic needs, identifying the priorities of care that the patient requires; I will then highlight a particular priority and give a rationale behind this. During an admission I completed under the supervision of my mentor, I was pre-assessing a 37 year old lady who had arrived at the unit for an upper gastrointestinal endoscopy. During the pre-assessment it was important that a holistic assessment is performed as every patient is an individual with unique care needs as the patient outlined in this piece of work has learning disabilities it was imperative to identify any barriers to communication (Nursing standards 2006). There were a number of nursing priorities identified, the patient also has hypertension.
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Electronic medical records not only effect health care professionals, but the patients of those health care providers as well. However, nurses spend the most time directly using electronic medical records to access patient date and chart. Nurses now learn to chart, record data, and interact with other health care providers electronically. Many assume that electronic means efficient, and the stories of many nurses both agree, and disagree. Myra Davis-Alston, a nurse from Las Vegas, NV, says that she “[likes] the immediate access to patient progress notes from all care providers, and the ability to review cumulative lab values and radiology reports” (Eisenberg, 2010, p. 9). This form of record keeping provides health care professionals with convenient access to patient notes, vital signs, and test results from multiple providers comprised into one central location. They also have the ability to make patients more involved in their own care (Ross, 2009). With the advancement in efficiency, also comes the reduction of costs by not printing countless paper records, and in turn, lowers health care
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