Just 5 Minutes for an Accurate Head to Toe Nursing Assessment | NURSING.com
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Nursing assessments are a vital part of learning how to be a great nurse. It’s a skill that can be very difficult to learn because as you learn all these different assessments you realize that as you start to put them all together an assessment could take 40 or more minutes!
There’s no time in a real nurse situation to do a 40 minute assessment. You may have 4 – 5 patients and you certainly won’t have the time for long assessments of each.
Know what sort of issues your patient has so that you know what areas to focus in on and save you time. You CAN do a full assessment in just 5 minutes.
This will allow you to not miss a thing in your nursing assessment but while staying speedy in the way you complete it.
5 Minutes Assessment Cheatsheet
We’ve put together a very helpful 5 minutes nursing assessment cheatsheet. Click the button below to download now:
Do you find yourself struggling on doing your assessment? My name is chance and I’m a nurse educator here at NRSNG and today I’m going to show you some tips and tricks on making sure that your assessments are consistent and thorough every single time. So first off, you always want to check your patients for symmetry. You want to make sure that they’re equal on both sides. You always want to be consistent with how you do your assessments. So always start with the head or always start with listening to specific areas. You always want to remain consistent because if you start to become inconsistent, what happens is that’s going to slow you down and create more frustration for yourself. The next tip that I have is to always look for the abnormal things so you inherently know what’s normal. So whenever you’re doing your assessment on your patient, always look for the abnormal things.
So are these abnormal lung sounds? Are they abnormal heart sounds? Are there differences in the way that a patient maybe blinks or speaks? You can always look for those abnormal things and identify those by focusing on these abnormal areas. It allows you to focus your attention on things that may need a little bit more nursing care. Lastly, when you’re doing an assessment, always be aware of what your patient needs. If they’re in pain, make sure that you’re not pressing on all of the painful parts if they’re complaining of abdominal pain, always assess that area. Last. Doing your assessment is extremely complicated. It’s very time consuming and you need to make sure that you practice these tips and tricks to make sure that you are on your a game, but there’s more to health assessments than just tips and tricks. I encourage you to go over to nrsng.com and go check out our courses on not only the five minute health assessment, but the complete health assessment that will give you some insight into what you need to know for your patients to make sure that you’re getting the big picture. Now, as we always say, go out and be your best selves today, and as always, happy nursing.
Thank you for tuning into another NRSNG podcast episode. Make sure to head on over to www.nrsng.com and create your free account to see why we’re the fastest growing nurse education platform. Happy nursing
