The Importance Of Health Assessment

The nursing profession is wide with many specified disciplines, which is why there is a necessity for frameworks to be implemented. These frameworks govern various procedures including: health assessments, effective communication, nurse/patient interactions, education and health promotion, clinical reasoning and reflective strategies. These procedures are vital to the function of a health service and must be moderated to ensure treatment is being delivered effectively.

Inadequate data collection from patients is unacceptable, which is why it is necessary to have and implement health assessment frameworks or strategies. Health or nursing assessments are continuous cycles of data collection and making inferences. There are steps to be taken to ensure adequate collection of objective and subjective data, these steps need to be taken in order otherwise an inaccurate assessment may occur. These steps are: assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementing and evaluation (Lewis, Foley, Weber, & Kelley, 2011, p. 2-5). Nursing assessments aim to collect subjective and objective data to determine a patient's overall functionality in order to make a clinical judgment, the nurse collects data relating to all areas of individual health. It is my opinion that appropriate health assessments are necessary to ensure a patient receives the correct treatment plan. All health assessment frameworks follow the same steps in organizing treatment, due to the wide scope of nursing disciplines there are varying focuses on these individual steps i.e. the emergency room could be more focused on the assessment in order to triage the patient. To help alleviate the patients or family members who may be distraught a health professional should take the time to expla...

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... of previous events. To conclude, reflection is a skill necessary to the efficient function of a nurse in order to identify risk factors, which can be reduced by better preparation.

To summarize, there is a constant need for health frameworks to govern nursing procedures. Nursing assessments require frameworks to reduce risks of wrong treatment, effective communication is required between colleagues and patients to avoid confusion. A standard of professionalism is required to ensure nurses aren’t over involved with their patients, education is important in promoting individual health, clinical reasoning is vital for the immediate treatment of a patient. Lastly reflection is ideal to analyse the positives and negatives, it is best to follow the Gibbs reflective cycle when evaluating methods. Health frameworks will play a constant role in the regulation of procedure.