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Nursing Care Plan Resources
Nursing care planning is an essential part of any nursing practice. It provides a written way to plan a patient's care and discharge based upon a diagnosis. Written nursing care plans also document changes in a patient's condition, adjustments or additions to a nursing diagnosis, as well as patient responses to nursing or medical treatment. Nursing care plans enable nurses to provide a holistic approach to patient needs, during hospitalization and after discharge.
Selected Nursing Care Plan Sites & Books
Nursing care plans must always be customized for each patient. In a perfect world, nurse staffing ratios would allow nurses unlimited time to sit at a desk and utilize their expertise. In this perfect world, each nurse would also have time to create a complete admission to discharge. This would include a detailed home care plan developed based on patient history, medical records, physical assessment, and applicable nursing diagnosis. Unfortunately, we live in an imperfect world! Hectic nursing shifts do not allow adequate time to research each patient's history and write a comprehensive care plan from scratch. Understaffed nursing teams try to keep up, but when time is limited, mistakes tend to happen more. These "stock" care plans, care plan software, and nursing care plan books are useful as reference tools to help prevent mistakes from happening when a nurse creates a patient-specific care plan.
- CarePlans.com This site provides resources for nursing assessment, planning, implementation, and evaluation. The site includes articles, links, and libraries to assist caregivers in the careplanning process.
- Comprehensive Nursing Care Plans Subscription based site that provides interactive instructive samples of nursing care plans addressing problems unique to nursing home residents.
- LTCS Books Provides care plans for long term care, (some free, some paid), books, articles, and news on nursing documentation.
- Mosby's Electronic Care Plan Constructor Providing more than 90 standard plans of care for the most commonly occurring medical-surgical conditions in adults, this interactive CD-ROM helps users eliminate the time spent mechanically constructing plans of care.
- Nursing Care Plans: Nursing Diagnosis and Intervention A collection of 58 nursing diagnosis care plans and 137 medical disorder care plans for patients in the acute care hospital setting. Each care plan defines the disorder and its symptoms, then offers guidelines for performing ongoing assessment and therapeutic interventions.
- RNCentral Care Plans Provides a moderate number of free to use customizable nursing care plans categorized by impairment or alterations.
- Sample Care Plan Offers one sample ready to use care plan for an MS patient.
- Transitional Care Planning Offers guidance for care planning to help facilitate continuity of care for cancer patients during shifts from one disease stage and/or place of care to another.
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