Eek! Mini Care Plans

Care plans are the bane of nursing students' lives. Oh, I imagine they're the bane of nursing teachers' lives as well. We students have to do six of them during this 8-week rotation in Chronic -- that's 6 x 40 = 240 care plans -- and the poor teachers have to read and correct them all. At least they're "mini" ones.

Strange though it may seem, and contrary to what their name implies, care plans are never actually used to plan care for patients. Each day, after I've already cared for my 2 patients to the best of my ability, I must choose one of them and use my notes to sort of "back-form" a care plan for that particular patient. It's a beloved (NOT) nursing school exercise whose avowed purpose is to teach us how to structure our thoughts about patient care.

Here's how it works: we come up with a "Nursing Diagnosis," and then use this as the basis to 1) discuss what the patient usually is able to do for himself, but can't right now because he's sick; and 2) describe what the next steps in helping him back to independence might be.

So far so good. The hard part comes when we have to take this nice, straight-forward description of the patient's situation and crow-bar it into the weird and convoluted system of nursing-research-speak known as "Orem's Self-Care Theory." Don't ask. Suffice to say Orem is full of jolly little aphorisms like: "Human beings experience limitations in ability to engage in the inputs for self and others for sustaining life and regulating function."

???

If she means people get sick and can't take care of themselves I wish she'd just say so, for crying out loud.