Nursing Care Plans: Importance, Benefits, and Future Practice Insights

This assignment analyzes the significance of nursing care plans within the nursing profession, emphasizing their role in providing patient-centered care through the systematic five-phase nursing process: assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation, and evaluation. The paper highlights the importance of individualized care, enhanced critical thinking, and improved clinical decision-making as key benefits of utilizing nursing care plans. It discusses how care plans foster continuity of care through effective documentation and communication, ensuring comprehensive patient management. The author, a nursing student, underscores the value of care plans in developing essential skills and preparing for future practice. The assignment references multiple scholarly sources to support the importance of nursing care plans at every stage of the nursing profession, from student to practicing nurse, and emphasizes the need for adequate training in developing individualized and patient-focused care plans.

Nursing
Student’s name:
Institutional:

Introduction
Nursing process serve as a systematic guide to achieve care that is patient-centered with five
phases. These are; assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation and evaluation. It offers a
modem to allow a nurse to think through problems and presents some organization of their
critical skills. It is flexible and therefore changes can be made as appropriate to suit the care of a
patient. A nurse however enhances creativity and think out of the box to come up with an
effective nursing care plan (Chan, 2012). The five phases are linked together such that one phase
leads to another. Nursing process is therefore important the management of my client.
Importance of using nursing process in care of my client
Nursing process will help me provide an individualized care based on the diagnoses that are
unique to the client (Doenges, & Moorhouse, 2012). The use of nursing process will also let me
to be able to figure out which problems should be prioritized for my client. In addition, provision
of care by use of nursing process promotes my creativity, critical thinking, decision making and
problem solving skills in my clinical practice (Yildirim, & Ozkahraman, 2011). The use of
nursing process is also important since my client’s level of satisfaction will be increases due to
the quality of care that nursing process enhances. The more I use nursing process as student to
write care plans for my clients then the more I acquire skills and process information like a
professional nurse.
Benefits of developing care plans in my future practice
As a future nurse, developing care plans will be of great benefit. This is because I will be able to
individualized the care of every patient according to their specific needs. Care plans also enhance

continuity of care since it acts as a form of communication from one shift to another. After
taking care of the patient’s needs, I will pass the updated care plan to the next nurse o duty
during rounds who will then continue from where I left. Developing a care plan enhances
documentation (Wang, Hailey, & Yu, 2011). Documentation always act as the only evidence that
something was done. Therefore, by writing down actions done in the care plans, the procedures
performed will be clearly known and it will be evident that I did them. This will also help in
assigning care for the client to various health worker, especially where collaborative
management is needed.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I have realized that nursing care plans are important in each and every stage in the
nursing profession. They come at every stage right from student level to the practicing level. I
should therefore take it seriously and always strive to do it better. I should also seek assistance
where I do not understand so that my skills keep on improving. Since nursing care plan is the
main tool for nursing practice, student should be adequately taught how to develop appropriate
nursing care plan that are focus on an individual client.

References
Chan, Z. C. (2012). Role-playing in the problem-based learning class. Nurse Education in
Practice, 12(1), 21-27.
Doenges, M. E., & Moorhouse, M. F. (2012). Application of nursing process and nursing
diagnosis: an interactive text for diagnostic reasoning. FA Davis.
Wang, N., Hailey, D., & Yu, P. (2011). Quality of nursing documentation and approaches to its
evaluation: a mixed‐method systematic review. Journal of advanced nursing, 67(9), 1858-1875.
Yildirim, B., & Ozkahraman, S. (2011). Critical thinking in nursing process and
education. International journal of humanities and social science, 1(13), 257-262.