Learn how to pick the right NANDA nursing diagnosis for your care plan. Start with a thorough patient assessment, use the Nursing Diagnosis Handbook by Aklian Ludwig, then prioritize using Maslow's hierarchy and the ABCs: airway, breathing, circulation. Problem-focused diagnoses come before risk diagnoses.
In this video, we're diving into how to pick the best nursing diagnosis for your nursing school care plan. We'll make sure that by the end of this video, you feel confident picking the best nursing diagnosis for your patient in your clinical assignments. So let's dive in. Now, before we get to it, I want to talk quickly about what your instructor is looking for when you are completing your nursing school care plan. This is the key to care plans, my friend. You have to know exactly what your instructor is looking for so you can do just that and ace your care plan. So here's what they're looking for. They want to know that you know why you are doing everything that you are doing. What is the rationale behind it? They want to make sure that you aren't just following along through the steps, going through the motions, but actually understand the why behind your actions. So you need to make sure that you prove that you know why you are choosing that particular nursing diagnosis for your patient to not just randomly picking one. That just sounds good. Now you might be asking, well, how would I prove that to them? Well, the best way to make sure that you prove that you know the why behind your care plan in a nursing diagnosis is to fully assess your patient. It sounds so simple. But this is really the first step to choosing the best nursing diagnosis. You need to assess your patient. You have to know your patient. Now, it's not just a quick head to toe assessment and and call it good. No, you need to actually know your patients. Spend time with them, assess them, get to know them and their condition, understand their needs that way. Because you've taken the time to actually know your patient and you've assessed them fully, then you can choose the most appropriate nursing diagnosis that is specific for them. So you see how that works. Now, I'm going to let you in on a secret here. It's something that you need to know about for clinical. Your clinical instructor might just be talking with your patients when you are not around. Happens all the time. So they will actually know things about your patient too. Perhaps even things you don't know. So don't try to fake your care plans and the details about your patients. It will not work. Your instructor will catch you, my friend. Take the time to actually assess your patient. Because when your instructor sees that your nursing diagnosis actually matches their condition in your assessment of them, that's the first step in proving to them that you know what you are doing. Which is a huge part of acing your nursing school care plans. So you fully assessed your patient and you're ready to actually select the best nursing diagnosis for them specifically. Now remember, the actual nursing diagnosis you select is not something that you come up with on your own. They come from a standardized list of NANDA approved nursing diagnoses. Okay? And if you're wondering where in the world can I possibly find the list of the NANDA nursing diagnoses? Well, the first place to look is your textbook. And if you really want to invest in a book that will help you throughout, well, all of your nursing courses and your nursing care plans. The best one, absolutely, hands down, the best one is this one. The Nursing Diagnosis Handbook by Aklian Ludwig. I'll leave the link down below in the description to another video as well. This video here that goes through how to use this book step by step. It is so worth it, my friend, to do yourself a favor. Snag this book right up. It's gonna help you so much. So we've been over the first two key things that you need to do when picking your nursing diagnosis for your care plan. Fully assessing your patient. Right. And then selecting the diagnosis from that NANDA approved diagnosis list. Now let's keep moving along to the next tip, which is honestly a huge one that nursing students either totally forget about or they have no idea how to do. That's why I'm here. You will know exactly what you need to do to prove to your nursing instructor that you know what you are doing and why. My friend, you need to prioritize your nursing diagnoses. You have to show your clinical instructor which diagnosis is more critical to the patient and put them in order for which one you'll sell first, second, third, and so forth. And to help you out, I actually have a free care plan cheat sheet that has this all written out for you. So click the link down below and snag that after you watch this video. So this is where you can really show your instructor that you're actually critically thinking. So this just means that you are doing the most important things first for your patient. Showing your instructors that you know what to do first, second, third, etc. And why. So how do you do this? How do you make sure that you are prioritizing your nursing diagnoses correctly, right? From most important, meaning the highest priority for the patient or the very first thing that you'll focus on to then the least priorities. So the next things that you'll focus on that are of less importance to your patient. Well, there's two principles that you will use for this. Maslow's hierarchy of needs in the ABCs. So with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you need to make sure that you are dealing with a patient's physiological needs and their safety needs first before you deal with things like their self esteem needs. So that makes sense. Right? And this goes along with the second principle of the ABCs, which stands for airway breathing and circulation. You've heard this before, meaning that you want to make sure that your patient is breathing, their blood is circulating before moving on to any any other needs. Those are your top priorities. You want to get those three things taken care of first before you move on to something else. Now, of course this all depends on your specific patient and what they're going through, but you've done your full assessment, right? So I have no doubt that you will be able to prioritize your nursing diagnosis based on your patient. So for example, you would want to pick a nursing diagnosis about compromised breathing or circulation, something like decreased cardiac output or ineffective breathing pattern before you pick a nursing diagnosis like a risk for activity intolerance or something like that. And here's a really good principle to keep in mind for your care plans. Those risk for nursing diagnoses are very rarely going to be your top priority unless the patient doesn't have anything else going on. That's pretty rare. We want to make sure that we're solving the actual problems that the patient is currently facing first before we move on to helping prevent any potential problems that they might have. My friend, if you want an example care plan to follow as you write your own, be sure to check out this video here where I walk you through, step by step, how to write it. And if you loved this video, write love in the comments below. And as always, my friend, go become the nurse that God created only you to be. And I will see you over there in that next video.
