Clinical Reasoning Cycle for Nursing Assignment

Running assignment: NURSING ASSIGNMENT
NURSING ASSIGNMENT
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

NURSING ASSIGNMENT
1
Consider the patient situation:
This is the first step of the clinical reasoning cycle, where the clinical situation of the
patient is considered. This assignment focusses on the case study of a 82 year old man john
wells, who has been admitted to the hospital due to behavioral change after an accident. He was
a farmer and resides in the rural areas with his wife. After assessing the Patient, it is found that
while coming from work on his cycle, he became unbalanced and hit his left side of the head
hard on the ground. His wife observed behavior change after his accident and asked his son to
take him to the hospital. He has a tear in his left side of the elbow and abrasion on the left
forearm. Apart from that he has not sustained any physical injury. Though according to the
patient, apart from the physical injury he is all right, his behavior indicates the sign of mental
illness. The patient has a past clinical history of hypertension for which he has not been
prescribed with any antihypertensive medication.
The primary complaints according to John and his son is fatigue, nausea, confusion, loss
of appetite, headache and quiet performance. Though he recently had an accident where his left
side of brain, which is responsible for the cognitive functioning of the body, got hit hard, there is
possibility that, the observed chief complaints is due to internal brain injury (Boyle et al. 2015).
Other possible cause behind his complications is hypertension. As the patient does not take any
antihypertensive medication, there are chances that due to high blood pressure, John became
unbalanced and met an accident (Xie et al. 2016).
Hence from the above it can be stated that there are two risk factors which can be
possible due to his current mental condition, one is hypertension and other is head injury. Due to
this the patient is having the headache followed with nausea and hazy.

NURSING ASSIGNMENT
2
Collection of cues and information:
In this step of the clinical reasoning cycle, information regarding the patient’s medical
conditions is gathered to form an appropriate care plan (Dalton, Gee and Levett-Jones 2015)
To collect all the adequate information required, subjective and objective data of the
patient is collected (Douw et al. 2016). In the objective data the vital assessment of the patient is
conducted. In the vital assessment, blood pressure, pulse rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation
and body temperature is assesses. Upon assessing, it is observed that the body temperature of the
patient is optimal (37.6 degree Celsius) and has no signs of complications. The pulse rate (82
beats per minute) and the respiratory rate (17 breaths per minute) of the patient is also optimal
that is within the normal range. Observed oxygen saturation is also within the normal range that
is above 95% (Deschamps et al. 2016). Only the blood pressure of the patient is found to be
elevated enough and has reached 148/84 which is not within the normal range (120/80) (Flynn et
al. 2017). This signs area assessed on regular intervals to monitor the current health condition of
the patient and to observe the recovery process of the patient.
The subjective data of the patient is collected after interviewing the patient that includes
loss of appetite, hazy, headache, nausea, mild confusion, dizziness and low level of
consciousness. To appraise the severity of the subjective data collected, different assessment is
conducted.
Glass coma scale is conducted to assess the level of consciousness, of the patient. This
test is usually performed in the case of patient suffering from any brain injury or illness. The
level of consciousness of the patient is measured by assessing the motor response, verbal
response and eye response of the patient and based on that score is given to the patient. The score