Concept Assessment In Nursing

The concept assessment simply refers to an act of appraisal, evaluation and judgment (Dossey, Keegan, & Barrere, 2015, 469). In nursing care, assessment is the first crucial step that is carried out to be able collect and analyze information about a client. Assessment involves various issues such as physiological, psychological, spiritual, socio-cultural, life-style, and economic factors. This essay explores assessments in nursing practice and their importance in this field. It also covers models such as biopsychosocial, holistic, nursing process, and Ropers’ nursing model of the twelve activities of living.
What is assessment?
Generally, an assessment in nursing involves an evaluation of an individual’s health. It is a key component of nursing

Biopsychosocial model mainly focuses on the biological, psychological, and social factors. According to this model, health and wellness are caused by an association of biological, psychological, and socio-cultural factors. The biological component refers to the pathogens that cause an illness. Psychological component covers the psychological triggers of health complications such as lack of self-control. Lastly, the social component discloses how different social factors like poverty and culture influence health. This model suggests that mind, body and environment interact in causing an illness. Holistic nursing assessment recognizes the totality of human being, that is, it focuses on the whole being. Notably, holistic nursing play a leading role in facilitating the healing process. It enables nurses to honor the clients’ subjective experience about health and beliefs, and so it assists individuals to access their greatest healing potential. It also allows the nurses to integrate self-care and self-responsibility and thus they understand their clients’ situations and relationships. Holistic model enables nurses to provide improved person-centered care to patients since it addresses all the needs of the patient including the physiological, psychological, developmental, and spiritual needs among

It is important that nurses acquire skills such as communication skills- both verbal and non-verbal, therapeutic, and clinical decision making among others. The ability of a nurse to communicate well and make appropriate clinical decision, determines the success of holistic assessment in nursing practice. There is no doubt that the capability of a nurse to provide the best and quality care is largely dependent on her or his ability to communicate, judge and make clinical decisions. Nurses needs to have a unique communication style that enable them acquire in-depth information from the clients. For instance, they should be able verbalize appropriate emotions and also communicate with the clients through non-verbal cues such as eye movement and gestures. Communication skills that are applicable in nursing assessment include active listening, observation, reflecting and interpreting (Dossey, Keegan, & Barrere, 2015, 469). Since holistic assessment aims at gathering necessary information about the patient, having knowledge on how to convince the patient to share all information even those they do not wish to disclose will enable the nurses to develop good relationship with client, thereby providing them the best care. More so, the decisions that nurses make are very crucial to the patient’s health because a proper treatment plan is