Health Assessment to Quality Nursing Diagnosis: Principles, Issues and Resolutions

Abstract

Health assessment is a crucial skill for nurses to assist decision making in identifying patient health problems and developing specific care plans for individual patients. Health assessment embraces both comprehensive assessment and focused assessment, which should be done simultaneously adopting cognitive, problem-solving, psychomotor, affective/interpersonal, and ethical skills. Health assessment comprises 4 steps which lead to quality nursing diagnosis including collecting the data, validating data, organizing or clustering the data, and recoding the data in order to gain accurate and complete data. In fact, even though health assessment plays an essential role for nurses, currently there are 4 dimensions of problems that sometimes make nurses unable to efficiently perform health assessment and accomplish accurate nursing diagnoses. The areas that need further resolution are: the nurses performing health assessments; development of health assessment competencies; support and opportunity; and patients and relatives.