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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.
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.