The Dreaded Careplans and Nursing Notes

      So one thing you have to get accustomed to doing in nursing is care plans and nursing notes. Another thing to get accustomed to are teachers that automatically assume you've been writing care plans and nursing notes your whole life. -_-Now don't get me wrong, I know the picture says that no one loves nursing school but I really do like it, I just thought this meme was funny lol. It's the careplans that annoy me. Basically what you have to do is write up a plan of care (in APA format of course) for a patient in which you diagnose, assess, identify expected outcomes, intervene, give rationale for these interventions, and finally evalution of the outcomes. All this is pretty helpful, but it would be even more helpful if we learned what to include or not to include in a care plan so they are not a complete waste of paper. I would get so much more out of the exercise if they actually gave us some sort of guideline to go by.With that being said, care plans will essentially always be a waste of paper because in the field you don't even do care plans. Majority of hospitals have computerized systems in which you choose from a list of information from each section to fill in your "care plan." Even nurses notes, they have a feature where you can make an acronym stand for a certain type of note and every time you want to use it, you simply type in the acronym and the prewritten blurb appears and can be edited to fit each patient or scenario accordingly. So why do we write care plans and notes you ask? The proper answer would be to say that it helps us understand the nursing process and actually put it into use. It also, in a sense, is just good practice to have. My answer is that they just want to torture us plain and simple. I know I probably sound like a pessimistic spoiled brat when it comes to these things (even though they are extremely tedious and annoying and I want to make the person whose bright idea it was to invent care plans never exist in history ever!) but what can I say, I'm a work in progress...