Advance Health Assessment

Introduction
Advanced practice nurses are very important in a healthcare system that is getting more
complex. Graduate-level nurses are learning new ways to provide cost-effective care to the
public, and patients are getting easier and easier access to primary care to help them deal with
their health and illnesses. So, nurses who want to go into advanced practice need to learn
important skills for giving patients good care. This paper aims to talk about how clinical
reasoning can be used to develop and use advanced health history and physical assessment skills.
It will also look at how the nursing process can improve critical thinking, clinical reasoning, and
clinical judgment in graduate-level professional nursing practice.
Clinical reasoning
Clinical reasoning and decision-making are terms that are frequently used
interchangeably in healthcare. They are the thought processes and strategies we use to
understand data and choose between alternatives when identifying patient problems in clinical
practice, preparing nursing diagnoses, and selecting nursing outcomes and interventions. Clinical
reasoning is described as thinking through the different aspects of the patient's situation in
making an informed decision about prevention, diagnosis, or treatment of a specific clinical issue
in a particular patient (Alfaro-LeFevre, 2015). Patient care entails taking the patient's history,
performing and ordering laboratory tests and diagnostics, designing safe and efficient treatment
regimens and preventive strategies, as well as patient education and counseling.
The clinical reasoning process is divided into eight major stages. The first step is
observing and thoroughly examining a patient's subjective and objective symptoms. The second
step entails collecting detailed information, including past and present facts related to the
patient's current medical condition. The third step involves processing the collected data and
thinking critically to establish the diagnosis and the best viable treatment plan. The fourth step is
to make a decision, which is defined as making the most appropriate potential treatment for
diagnosis, treatment, or mitigation based on an in-depth analysis of the patient's history and
current situation. Planning entailing developing a detailed treatment protocol that may
necessitate consultation with other medical professionals with specific specialty areas comes 5 th .
The action comes 6 th after planning, delivering the committed care plan efficiently and accurately
(Alfaro-LeFevre, 2015). Evaluation comes 7 th , entailing assessing the treatment plan's outcomes
to determine its effectiveness. The final step involves reflecting on the outcomes and determining
whether the treatment plan needs to be modified in the future depending on the outcomes
received after implementing the plan. Learning and ultimately mastering decision-making skills
and all phases of clinical reasoning will undoubtedly assist nurses at the graduate level in
developing advanced health history and physical evaluation skills that can be practiced in a
digital healthcare environment like shadow health and applied in an actual scenario in the future.
Nursing process
The nursing process is a systematic care approach based on critical thinking, patient-
centered strategies for treatment, target-oriented tasks, evidence-based practice
recommendations, and nursing intuition. The nursing process, like clinical reasoning, is divided
into phases; Assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation, and evaluation (Schober, 2016).
Assessment entails critical thinking skills and the examination and collection of subjective and
objective patient health data, which other healthcare providers or family members can provide.
This step requires critical thinking as it is critical not to overlook any information that could lead
to a successful diagnosis. North American Nursing Diagnosis Association (NANDA) defines
nursing diagnosis as the second step of the nursing process as a clinical judgment regarding
responses to actual or possible health problems upon that part of the patient, family, or
community. Planning comes 3 rd when treatment objectives tailored to the patient's health and
condition are established. Care plans for nurses improve communication, documentation,
reimbursement, and continuity of care across the healthcare continuum (Schober, 2016). The 4th
step is implementation, where the nursing care plan is delivered, for instance, medication
administration, oxygen administration, health education, and so on. The fifth and last


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