The Holistic Assessment of a Patient Admitted to a Hospital :: Nursing Medical Papers Surgery

The purpose of this essay is to describe the holistic assessment of a 66 year old male patient who has been admitted to hospital for bowel surgery following the diagnosis of a cancerous tumor. The operation will result in the patient having a part of his bowel removed after which the patient will require a colostomy bag for the elimination of feces (see patient profile in appendix 1 for further details). A Pseudonym will be used to protect the patient’s confidentiality and he will be referred to as ‘Peter’ in this essay which is in line with the nurses’ code of conduct guidelines (NMC 2002). The process of the assessment will be described along with the nursing model chosen. The nursing model gives the student nurse a framework to help direct and guide her throughout the assessment process (Aggleton and Chalmers, 2000). The Roper, Tierney and Logan model (1986) has been chosen as it is the model the ward follows for all assessment procedures. The assessment process using the Roper, Tierney and Logan model is holistic because it relates to the study of the human being as a whole rather than its individual parts. A holistic view point includes two basic beliefs: 1) The individual always responds as a unified whole, 2) Individuals as a whole are different from and more than the sum of their parts (Pearson, Vaughan and Fitzgerald, 2000). Thus the assessment process would not be as accurate if you concentrated on individual systems or parts of the human body. This holistic approach takes into consideration the biological, social and cultural factors that will affect the outcome of the assessment. The nursing process was introduced as a method of nursing that concerns itself with individual’s physical, social and psychological reactions to disease, and which takes into account that the patient is a member of society, which may affect his reaction to disease (Faulkner, 1996). The nursing process is a sequence of steps (Person, Vaughan and Fitzgerald, 1997) passed through in order to achieve the