Clinical Reasoning Cycle Health Assessment 2022

Running head: HEALTH ASSESSMENT
CLINICAL REASONING CYCLE
Name of the student
Name of the university
Author note

1HEALTH ASSESSMENT
Consider the patient situation
In this paper, the case study of John Wells (82 years) would be considered as the
patient situation and while developing his priority based care, Levett-Jones clinical reasoning
cycle would be used for developing effective flow of interventions.
John Wells (82) is a dairy farmer who met with an accident on the day he was brought
to the emergency department of the healthcare facility by his son, Sam. While returning home
from his dairy farm, John fell from his motorbike as he became unstable. As per John, he fell
on his left side, due to which, the left side of his head hit the clear ground. As he was not
wearing any protective equipment at the time of accident, along with mild head injury, he
sustained skin tears in his elbows and forearm. After this incidence, he started feeling dizzy,
nauseated and headache. Further, Mavis, his wife also observed that he is unable to remember
the tasks he performed this morning and also felt lack of appetite, due to which she become
concerned about John. While discussing his medical history, no such head injury related
history was found as well as no risk of health complaints and critical conditions were
observed in the patient that could related to his current chief problems, associated with head
ache, nausea and dizziness. However, in criticism of the same, as per Wallace et al. (2017),
there are other risk factors that could be associated with his chief health concerns. Such risk
factors will comprise of adverse health consequences such as lack of energy, high or low
blood sugar level, sudden fall in the blood pressure and others. Furthermore, as per Rague
(2017), one of the primary risk factors of concussion includes chronic and fatal consequences
such as long term concussive damage that occurs due to direct accident or head injury.
Hence, from this discussion it is evident that concussion and associated head ache and injury
are the primary risk factors of John’s health complication due to which he is suffering from
head ache, nausea and dizziness. Therefore, it becomes important to collect the cues of his
health complication through application of health assessment and then determine the reason

2HEALTH ASSESSMENT
and interventions of his complications (Baxter and Udod 2019). One of the primary reasons
underlying the collection of cues associated with John’s complication includes an
understanding and subsequent development of a preferential order of healthcare processes
and interventions. Such a nursing process would be effective in developing a comprehensive,
holistic and efficient flow of interventions for Mr. Wells so as to instil critical awareness on
the need to include quality and holistic nursing care during healthcare health care intervention
implementation (Goodman et al. 2016).
Collecting cues and information
After Sam brought John Wells to the healthcare facility with his health complications,
vital signs were collected. As the patient complained about having dizziness, nausea, mild
confusion, vital signs were assessed for collection of cues regarding identification of
abnormalities in the patient’s baseline physiological processes. The body temperature of John
was optimum, whereas the blood pressure was slightly elevated as the reading was 148/84
mmHg. Besides this, the pulse rate and respiratory rate was found to be in optimum range.
The oxygen saturation level was also optimum hence no connection between his
complications and his vital signs were observed. However, he was facing difficulty in
remembering his day’s activities as well as due to loss of appetite and head injury, he was
feeling dizziness. Hence, in such condition, few other assessments should also be conducted
to understand the effectiveness of it. As per, Yue et al. (2017) Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS)
should be included in the diagnosis process as it helps to analyse the consciousness of
patients that are suffering from severe brain injury. Through the measurement of these
aspects such as eye opening, verbal responses, motor responses their level of consciousness
are assessed. As per Reith et al. (2016), if the patient obtains score less than 8, then he should
be considered as severely injured, whereas pain score between 9 to 12 is considered as
moderately injured. The normal range of GCS is 13 to 15. Hence, in case of John Wells, this