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The Nursing Process in Action | A Real-Life Nursing Example

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Video summary

The video introduces the nursing process as a systematic framework used in healthcare education, using the relatable analogy of baking a cake to simplify complex concepts for new students. The speaker acknowledges that learners often struggle to understand the necessity of this structured approach but aims to demonstrate its practical application through everyday problem-solving. By comparing clinical scenarios to familiar activities like cooking, the explanation seeks to demystify the five core steps: assessment, problem identification (referred to as nursing diagnosis), planning, implementation, and evaluation, followed by reassessment if goals are not met. In this specific example, the process begins with an assessment of available resources, such as checking for necessary ingredients and kitchen tools like baking pans and measuring spoons. If items like baking soda or a specific spoon are missing, the speaker identifies these gaps as problems that must be resolved before proceeding. This leads to the planning phase, where one devises a strategy to acquire missing supplies and ensures the oven is functional, effectively creating a roadmap for success. The implementation stage then involves executing the plan by combining wet and dry ingredients, pouring them into the pan, and baking the cake according to the recipe's timeline. Once the cake is baked, the evaluation phase occurs, where the outcome is measured against the desired goals to determine if it tastes sweet enough, has the right texture, or requires frosting. If the result falls short of expectations, the speaker suggests returning to earlier steps to adjust variables, such as adding more baking soda, reducing sugar, or altering the baking time. This iterative cycle highlights that nursing, like baking, is not a linear one-time event but a continuous loop where unsatisfactory results prompt reassessment and modification of the approach for future attempts. Ultimately, the video concludes by emphasizing that this structured thinking process extends far beyond the hospital or kitchen, occurring naturally in daily life when navigating traffic, shopping for groceries, or finding optimal routes. The speaker encourages nursing students to recognize that while the terminology may be specific to the profession, the underlying logic of assessment, planning, doing, and evaluating is universal. By mastering this sequence, students can avoid common pitfalls, such as attempting to evaluate a result before ensuring all prerequisites are in place, thereby fostering a disciplined and effective approach to both personal tasks and professional patient care.
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Welcome to Nursing School Explained, and an explanation of the nursing process in simple terms. If you have just started nursing school and you're learning about the nursing process, you're probably thinking, "Why the heck do I need this?" And it sometimes can be difficult to understand why we need it, but I wanted to give you an example of a real-life um scenario where you might be actually using the steps of the nursing process on a regular basis. And the example that we're going to go over today is baking a delicious cake. Now, some of you you might not be bakers or chefs or cooks, and that's totally fine, but we're just going to use that example to go over the concept of the nursing process. And as you probably already know, the nursing process has five steps, which is assessment, and then either nursing diagnosis -ish. I kind of cringe when I hear that word cuz it's so outdated and old school. I like to call it problem identification. Then we go into planning, implementation, evaluation, and then back into reassessment if we have accomplished our goal. So, if we're trying to bake a cake, we first need to have an assessment. We have a list of ingredients and a list of things that we're going to need to bake, like a baking form, a cake form, a spring form, anything that you need, measuring spoons, those kind of things. So, we're going to assess our kitchen to see what do we have available. Do we have all the ingredients or not? And then do we have all the utensils I'm going to say that we're going to need. So, then for problem identification, we're going to say, "Well, I'm lacking baking soda and a teaspoon measuring spoon." So, then I'm going to have to go get those. So, now I have identified my problem and I need to work on getting those resolved before I can go ahead and get started on baking this cake. Now, then planning if I'm lacking a couple of things, I'm going to need to plan to go to the store and bring those things to the house so that then I can go ahead and bake the cake. But, I also need to plan some time and making sure that the oven is functioning and that I have everything that I need. And then we go into implementation. So, implementation then is actually baking the cake because now I have everything that I need. I'm going to put all the ingredients together, mix them up, wet ingredients, dry ingredients, put them all in a springform or whatever it is that you're going to put them, and then you're going to bake the cake for a certain period of time. After that certain period of time, you're going to evaluate the product and your cake. Is it good? Is it sweet enough? Is it fluffy enough? Does it need any frosting? You're going to see how good it turned out according to the recipe. And then if you decide that the evaluation is not quite satisfactory, that you haven't accomplished all the goals, maybe you need to go back and see, "Hmm, do I need to maybe add a little bit more baking soda or a little bit more sweetener or is it too sweet? Do I need to leave out some sugar? Do I need to bake it 5 minutes longer or not?" So, this is the the evaluation phase. And then we go ahead and we'll reassess because then we're going to do the whole thing again, probably not on the same day cuz yeah, we could, but why would we want to eat two cakes in one day? And then we're going to reassess for next time. Do I have the ingredients? What have I learned from it? How can I make it better next time? And this is a very simplified approach to the nursing process. You're doing this every day when you go into the grocery store, when you're driving in traffic, when you're trying to find the best route, you're doing a lot of problem solving already. This nursing process is just putting it in nursing terms, but the process is the same for many different things that we do on a daily basis. So, just try and get your thinking around that, and it's not that complicated. Just make sure that you follow the different steps each time, that you know what comes first, second, third, and that you don't do anything to evaluate the cake to bake it before you make sure that you have all the ingredients ready for home. So, remember the order of the nursing process as well. I do have a whole playlist on nursing fundamentals or foundations that go into details of the nursing process, where I go over any actual nursing related topics or concepts or problems. So, check those out, too. Please hit like and subscribe to my channel, and I'll see you soon.