Developing Strategies for Teaching Nursing Diagnosis

Abstract

Nursing practice has evolved through a series of changes during the last half century. A most significant change has been in the development and use of nursing process skills, with the recent focus on nursing diagnosis. Efforts to keep practising nurses' knowledge and skills in pace with theory development has been a constant challenge to nurse educators. Since the early 1960s, the trend in nursing practice has been to use structured problem solving or what is known as "the nursing process". Ziegler (1984) states that the nursing process is the methodology of professional nursing. Patient problems are identified and a plan of nursing care is developed. The nursing process has gradually evolved to the current five-step technique identified by Mundinger and Jauron (1975) as: assessment, nursing diagnosis, planning, implementation and evaluation. In more recent years, the focus of this process has centred on problem identification or "nursing diagnosis" (the second step of the nursing process.) This paper presents a preliminary study that looks at the teaching strategies used to develop nursing diagnostic skills.