Fundamenten van het verpleegproces I

The nursing process is one of the specific critical thinking competencies. It is an evidence-based approach to care that nurses use for delivering care, fostering human functions, and responding to health and illness.

The purposes of the nursing process are:

To identify a patient's health status and health care needs.

To execute plans to meet the identified needs.

To deliver need-based nursing interventions.

To protect nurses from accusations related to nursing care.

There are five steps in the nursing process: assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation, and evaluation.

Nursing assessment is the orderly collection, organization, validation, and documentation of data.

Nursing diagnosis includes interpreting the assessed data and identifying the patient's actual problem.

Planning is formulating patient goals and making blueprints of the interventions required to prevent, reduce, or eliminate health problems.

Implementation consists of performing and documenting the nursing activities.

Finally, evaluation is a planned, ongoing, purposeful activity in which the nurse determines the patient's progress towards achieving goals. It also determines the effectiveness of the nursing care plan.