Health And Social Care: The Nursing Process

The Nursing Process is an organisational model of care that should ubiquitously be implemented and continuously developed in every health and social care setting. An advantage of having a designed model for the process of nursing is that it is able to provide structure and guidance to the assessment of care for a patient, as well as focusing the nurse’s primary attention on patients’ foremost problems (Ford & Walsh, 1994). When utilised in conjunction with nursing models, the Nursing Process aids nurses to focus on their individual patient, helping them identify specific characteristics and health-related problems requiring treatment. The Nursing Process implies that nurses should be involved in assessing, planning, implementing and evaluating

Nursing interventions would have been suggested in the planning stage in relation to the ability of being able to achieve each goal. Therefore, it is during this consecutive phase that they will be put into action; as well as having a justified rationale as to why certain procedures and interventions are being implemented (Gardner, 2003). This stage encompasses the processes of monitoring the patient for signs of improvement or deterioration; directly caring for the patient by performing necessary medical tasks; educating a patient about how to improve their overall health and additionally, it involves contacting the patient for follow-up. Therefore, the length of this stage differs from one patient to the next, taking place over the course of hours, days, weeks, or even months (Nursing Process, 2015). What must be taken into consideration, is that it is justified for action to be taken in an emergency or life-threatening situation, regardless of the scheduled written procedures because, as previously mentioned, these cannot always be foreseen, and it is the responsibility of the nursing and multi-disciplinary team to act accordingly largely depending upon their intellectual, technical and decision-making skills (Sirra, 2005). Under the ‘Practice Effectively’ Nursing Code of Conduct guidelines, the importance of clear communication is implied as well as the ability to work cooperatively- this is especially true during this phase of the Nursing Process because, during the implementation phase – it is essential for a nurse to talk to his or her patients (NMC, 2015). It requires a nurse to find a balance between explaining to their patient the procedures that they are concurrently implementing, as well as asking and discussing more individualised questions that are personal and relevant to what the nurse discovered