Nurse Role in Health Assessment (ANSWERED)

QUESTION

Purpose

The purpose of this reflection is for learners to reflect on the nurse’s role in health assessment in various care settings.

Course Outcomes

This reflection enables the student to meet the following course outcomes:

CO 1: Demonstrate a head to toe physical assessment. (PO 1)

CO 3: Describe physical, psychosocial, cultural, and spiritual influences on an individual’s health status. (PO 1)

Directions

Reflection is an activity that involves your deep thought into your own experiences related to the concepts of the week. Answers should be detailed. In reflections students:
- Demonstrate understanding of concepts for the week
- Engage in meaningful dialogue with classmates and/or instructor
- Express opinions clearly and logically, in a professional manner
Use the rubric on this page as you compose your answers.
Scholarly sources are NOT required for this reflection
Best Practices include:
- Participation early in the week is encouraged to stimulate meaningful discussion among classmates and instructor.
- Enter the reflection often during the week to read and learn from posts.
- Select different classmates for your reply each week.

Reflection Questions

Reflect on your current or prior practice setting.

Paragraph One: Briefly describe the type(s) of nursing health assessments you commonly perform.
- Explain how your nursing health assessments are focused or comprehensive.
- Provide examples of key subjective and objective data collected by nurses in this setting.
Paragraph Two: Describe the typical patient population in your practice setting.
- What are some special considerations that you have used for obtaining an accurate health history and physical assessment in this patient population?
  - Examples may include age, lifestyle, financial status, health status, culture, religion, or spiritual practices.

ANSWER

Admission Assessments in Geriatric Care

I used to participate in admission assessments involving nursing assessments of patients’ history, physical examination, general appearance, and vital signs. These are usually comprehensive assessments that prioritize developing a plan for delivering the best patient care. Usually, the comprehensive data used to carry out wide assessments of the patient included physiological, psychological, and social determinants of health, spiritual ad lifestyle, and socioeconomic information. According to Jarvis (2018), to do comprehensive assessments, a nurse should notice potential or underlying health signs through the signs guided by the gathered data. Considering the care setting involved in working with the elderly, when I observed a patient struggling or having short breath, and the patient states that they experience pain in their chest, the observation is objective data, while the patient’s complaint is subjective data. At the same time, if the patient states that they have a rash on their ankle and leg and I observe the client’s sitting posture as troubled, I would have obtained subjective and objective data at once.

Working with the aging patient population requires special considerations to ease information collection on their health history and physical assessment. Since this group requires patience and care when handling them, the nurse doing comprehensive health assessment needs to build rapport with the patients, know what they should look for in a patient, and use critical thinking skills to analyze the objective and subjective data for the development of a care plan (Teófilo et al., 2019). Furthermore, they have to ascertain their lifestyle leading up to their visit to the hospital or clinic visit. If they already have an existing illness, it should be determined early for easy progress to another step of assessment considering their delicate state. For instance, if a patient needs to be assessed, the nurse should determine if they have a pre-existing condition like blood pressure or allergies. Still, the aging without proficient communication skills should be accompanied by a caregiver or family member.

References

Jarvis, C. (2018). Physical Examination and Health Assessment-Canadian E-Book. Elsevier Health Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969733018787228

Teófilo, T. J. S., Veras, R. F. S., Silva, V. A., Cunha, N. M., Oliveira, J. D. S., & Vasconcelos, S. C. (2019). Empathy in the Nurse-Patient Relationship in Geriatric Care: An Integrative Review. Nursing Ethics, 26(6), 1585-1600.