Family Nurse Practitioner Clinical Decision Tree: Sore Throat

This project from the Columbus State University School of Nursing Family Nurse Practitioner Program presents a clinical decision tree analysis for a patient complaint of sore throat. The assignment requires the student to develop hypothetical patient cases for three faculty-chosen diagnoses: Strep Pharyngitis, Viral Pharyngitis, and Mononucleosis. The student must create a detailed case presentation, including the History of Present Illness (HPI) with seven variables (location, quality, quantity, chronology, setting, aggravating/alleviating factors, and associated manifestations), physical exam findings, pertinent positives and negatives, and differential diagnoses for each condition. The project further demands the creation of a diagnostic plan, treatment recommendations (both pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical), and follow-up strategies for each diagnosis, reflecting the cognitive process of inductive clinical reasoning. The assignment is based on the Clinical Simulation in Nursing guidelines.