Formulation and following up on a plan of care

Abstract

In 1977, the General Nursing Council (which was to be replaced by the UKCC in 1983) decreed that nurses in the United Kingdom would henceforth use something called ‘the nursing process’. There was a lot of opposition to this ‘newfangled American nonsense’ at first,¹ but through the efforts of the nursing press, those health authorities farsighted enough to appoint ‘nursing process coordinators’, and, most importantly of all, the comparatively small number of practising nurses who were open-minded enough to give the idea a try in their areas of work, it eventually became an accepted part of British practice — so much so that it is difficult to believe, now, how much controversy attended its introduction to these shores. If asked, ‘What are the stages of the nursing process?’, there would not be many nurses in this country who could not reel off ‘assessment, planning, implementation and evaluation’. (Note: in this text, the authors use the word ‘intervention’ instead of ‘implementation’, a convention which has found favour amongst some nursing writers in this country.)