Health Assessment (Peer post replies)

Reply Posts

Respond to your peers’ post and include the following:

· Insight on a solution to an identified peer challenge.

· Resources that may be helpful related to your peers’ post.

POST # 2 WANDA

(Wanda’s initial Post)

Reflect on the focus area or system(s) for the week.

· What challenges might you anticipate in completing this assessment?

· What differences might you anticipate when assessing patients across the lifespan?

· Share findings from scholarly resources that help in the performance of this assessment.

What challenges might you anticipate in completing this assessment? 

I do not expect any significant challenges in achieving this week's assessment because I exam patients daily with respiratory issues such as SOB, asthma, CHF, COPD, etc. However, one of my challenges would be accurately assessing patients with cardiac problems. I do not have much experience in the cardiac field of studies. I have worked with telemetry patients. Therefore, I know what the different heart rhythms are. However, I have no other experience working with such patients.

What differences might you anticipate when assessing patients across the lifespan? 

Differences that I may foresee this week when assessing patients across the life span are infants and children. Infants and children have more significant health care needs. Their care and outcomes depend upon the family that takes care of them. Therefore, as an NP, you must use developmentally suitable approaches to examine infants and children (Bickley et al., 2017). One must also develop a great rapport with the family. There are also social, cultural, political, and economic factors that impact the assessment of infants and children. Young adults typically have good health. However, social behaviors pose a problem with their health care because they tend to have a lot of peer pressure and try to fit in. The elderly patient has several healthcare needs and comorbidities. Much attention must be paid to help the elderly patient retain physical, mental abilities, and independence. An issue that young adults and the elderly may face are non-compliance. Therefore, this could cause a problem with compliance, follow-up appointments, and plan of care. 

Share findings from scholarly resources that help in the performance of this assessment. 

An academic resource that will help with assessments this week is auscultation of the respiratory system. According to Sarkar et al. (2015), the respiratory system's auscultation is a cheap, non-invasive, safe, easy-to-perform, and one of the physicians' oldest diagnostic techniques to identify a variety of pulmonary diseases. However, thorough historical background and a comprehensive physical examination, comprising inspection, palpation, percussion, and auscultation, should be considered an essential part of clinical examination (Sarkar et al., 2015). 

 

References

Bickley, L. S., Szilagyi, P. G., & Hoffman, R. M. (2017). Bates guide to physical examination and history taking (12th ed.). Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer.

Sarkar, M., Madabhavi, I., Niranjan, N., & Dogra, M. (2015). Auscultation of the respiratory system. Annals of thoracic medicine, 10(3), 158–168. https://doi.org/10.4103/1817-1737.160831