Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Assignment

Running head: CASE STUDY
CASE STUDY
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

CASE STUDY
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INTRODUCTION
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease or COPD can be defined as a lungs disease
that makes breathing difficult by obstructing the airway. COPD occurs in two forms, which
are chronic bronchitis involving long term coughing with mucus and emphysema that causes
damage to the lungs. The main cause of developing COPD is smoking (Medlineplus, 2020).
In the given case study, Hadden is a 63 year old man having moderate COPD and a habit of
smoking 20 cigarettes per day since the last 40 years. He was diagnosed with lower lobe
pneumonia and received treatment in the hospital. He was discharged 3 weeks ago after
completing the treatment for pneumonia. However, during his check-up 4 days ago he was
diagnosed with an acute exacerbation of his existent COPD. In this essay, priorities of
Hadden’s health condition, the nursing interventions, strategies that can be used to evaluate
the outcomes and the application of clinical reasoning cycle will be discussed in details.
PRIORITIES OF MEDICATION SELF-MANAGEMENT
As a registered nurse in charge of Hadden, I would follow the clinical reasoning cycle
and collect cues at first. I would review the current available information about the patients
including his medical history, medication charts and the tendencies the patient has towards
taking medication and necessary other things. I would also gather newer information while
assessing his condition and also apply the knowledge I have to think of the medical priorities
that needs addressing and also a plan for his medication self management, which is an
extremely important thing to design (School of Nursing and Midwifery, 2020). As the trends
of the patient shows that he continues to smoke at the same rate and often goes out of the
house without his oxygen source and also takes the medicines when he recalls about them.
This implies to more harm that he has been causing to himself without much knowledge.
Smoking in this condition is very much harmful and I would suggest him to get rid of this

CASE STUDY
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habit as early as possible and would also offer him smoking cessation programs (Smoking
Cessation Guidelines, 2020). Coming to the medication front, it is crucial for him to take the
five medicines prescribed to him regularly on time so that his condition gets better and his
smoking addiction also gets reduced as his medicine list contains Nicorette patches, which
help in managing smoking addiction (Pešic et al., 2017). Apart from this, it is also necessary
for Hadden to use his oxygen support continuously as without the support his blood oxygen
saturation is reaching an abnormally low percentage of 87% and he is getting breathless even
after a little exhaustion.
NURSING INTERVENTIONS
It is necessary to apply few important nursing interventions to improve Hadden’s
health. The interventions are required to build and implement depending upon three phases of
the clinical reasoning cycle including problem identification, goals establishment and taking
actions (School of Nursing and Midwifery, 2020). Depending on the criticality of Hadden’s
health, many of the aspects are required to keep in the mind before implementing any nursing
intervention to support his medication self-arrangement. Hadden’s capacity to inhale oxygen
without any artificial oxygen support has been reduced considerably as his blood oxygen
saturation gets quite lower to 87% than the original percentage, which is 95-100% (Durlinger
et al., 2017). His respiration rate is 34 breaths per minute, which is also much higher than the
normal rate of 12-25 breaths per minute (Banet, McCOMBIE & Dhillon, 2020). It is also
seen that on applying external oxygen source his blood oxygen saturation level increases to
92%. As mentioned above, he has also mentioned about his habit of taking the medicines
when he recalls about them and also not carrying the oxygen support with him, it also causes
a plethora of problems. Therefore, it is very important to make Hadden aware about the
situation and his health condition. The most reliable intervention would be providing proper
knowledge to Hadden about COPD, his current condition and the consequences it might lead