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Health History and Patient Assessment (n317)

Course Number: 317

Credits: 4

Prerequisites: Current RN license and a mentor. We prefer the mentor be a Master's prepared Nurse who monitors student skills as they are progressing through the course. Physician Assistants and Physicians may also serve as mentors. Assessing does not have to be done in the clinic setting on a "real" patient. It can be done in the home with an adult family member or friend as the patient. The average amount of time spent with the mentor is two hours per week. This will vary depending upon student skills. Each session should build on previous learning while focusing on a new technique.

Course Description

An introductory, four-credit course for registered nurses emphasizing the skills essential to the assessment aspects of the nursing process. The course purpose is to broaden learners' knowledge base, and increase their assessment skills and their ability to recognize the wide range of "normal" health status in a clinical setting. The knowledge from this course is immediately applicable to everyday patient care.

Course Objectives

The objective of this course is to provide students with the necessary skills in their clinical settings to do the following:

  1. Apply basic critical-thinking skills used in the nursing assessment.
  2. Accurately obtain all components of the health history. Differentiate between the history taking of patients based on cultural or development differences.
  3. Construct a nutritional history of a patient.
  4. Discuss how the basic mental status of a patient can be evaluated and how it affects the health history.
  5. Identify how a patient's pain status can be evaluated.
  6. Manipulate and correctly operate certain instruments required in carrying out a physical examination.
  7. Begin to differentiate among the wide range of normal and grossly abnormal findings throughout the physical examination of a client.
  8. Perform a systematic physical examination on a client for each body system.
  9. Record the findings of the health history and physical assessment.

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