WHAT ARE CONCEPT MAP CARE PLANS IN NURSING ?

Schuster, Pamela McHugh

The concept map care plan is an innovative approach to planning and organizing nursing care.
In essence, a concept map care plan is a diagram of patient problems and interventions. Your ideas about patient problems and treatments are the “concepts” that will be diagrammed. The term concept means idea. You will diagram your ideas about the patient’s problems and their treatments. Developing clinical concept map care plans will enhance your critical thinking skills and clinical reasoning because you will clearly and succinctly visualize priorities and identify relationships in clinical patient data.
Concept map care plans are used to organize patient data, analyze relationships in the data, establish
priorities, build on previous knowledge, identify what you do not understand, and enableyou to take a holistic view of the patient’s situation.
OVERVIEW OF STEPS IN CONCEPT MAP CARE PLANNING
The nursing process is foundational to developing and using the concept map care plan or any
other type of nursing care plan. The nursing process involves assessing, diagnosing, planning, implementing, and evaluating nursing care.
These steps of the nursing process are related to the development of concept map care plans and
the use of care plans during patient care in clinical settings. Subsequent chapters will give the details
of concept map care planning with learning activities, but it is important for you to have an
initial overview.
Preparation for Concept Mapping Before developing a concept map, the first thing you must do is gather clinical data. This step corresponds to the assessment phase of the nursing process. You must review patient records to determine current health problems, medical histories,physical assessment data, medications, and treatments. This assessment must be complete and accurate because it forms the basis for the concept map. Some of you may have the opportunity to briefly meet patients the night before you care for them. In just five minutes of interacting with a patient—even by simply introducing yourself and watching the patient’s response—you can gain a wealth of information
about the patient’s mood, level of comfort, and ability to communicate. Chapter 2 will focus on
how to gather this clinical data in preparation for developing a concept map.