Day 14

Right, so I am happy that today is actually the last day of this week!  No classes for Friday!!

The only downside is that today is ALL DAY communications.  It's kind of rough to do the same class, all day, starting an hour earlier and lasting an hour longer, at the end of the week.  In any case, today was good, because we learned about charting and doing nursing diagnoses.

The best way I can describe nursing diagnoses is describing the problem, the physiology, and the evidence (your observations) without actually naming a disease.  So, something like Congestive Heart Failure could be characterized by a lot of issues.  Let's run with edema.  What you could say, as a nurse for a diagnosis, is "decreased cardiac output r/t (related to) impaired cardiac function aeb (as evidenced by) bilateral lower extremity edema".  Basically, nursing diagnoses back up the medical diagnosis, but also go beyond just what you see.  As nurses, we are expected to look to spiritual health, emotional health, psychological health, and any educational deficits (i.e. nutrition, hygiene) a person may have.

We also had a presentation on concept mapping, which we must do for our clinicals.  We are to choose a patient, identify their primary medical diagnosis, say what the risk factors are, work out the pathophysiology of the primary diagnosis, look at diagnostic tests (lab work), take note of assessment findings, and then write out nursing diagnoses and interventions.  And, as if that wasn't enough fun, we have to draw the arrows that connect certain pieces of data from one section to another.  Wow.  But, I am happy to say that I'm kind of excited for this, because I know it will help so much to start thinking like that.