Understanding Care Plans

The nursing process is a problem-solving approach to client care.  It is based on the way scientists look at their work.  The nursing process provides the foundation for how nurses perform their jobs and how care plans are created.

The nursing process involves five separate steps that are repeated over and over throughout the delivery of client care.  These steps include:

1. Assessing the client.
2. Identifying the client’s needs.
3. Planning the client’s care.
4. Delivering the client’s care.
5. Evaluating the client’s status.

These five steps require creative thinking and the use of problem-solving and decision-making skills.  During their schooling, nurses are taught to create—and follow through with—care plans using these five steps.

Things to Remember About Care Plans:

• Care plans focus on the whole client, including any medical, nursing, psychological, and social needs.
• Care plans are tools used to restore a client’s good health, to prevent additional health problems, or to assist the terminally ill client to achieve a peaceful death.

Most care plans include information about:

• The types of healthcare services a client needs and how often they are needed.
• The equipment needed to care for the client.
• The nutritional needs of the client.
• Ways to ensure the client’s safety.

Care plans identify what clients can already do for themselves and they build on those strengths.  Most care plans are coordinated by one person, usually a nurse.