Essentials of Nursing Practice
Student Resources
Chapter 14: Assessment, planning, implementation and evaluation (APIE): The process of nursing 205
1. When performing a patient assessment, several skills are required. What skills might these might include?
Answer: observe, measure, listen, question, examine, analyse, interpret
2. Why might you prefer to use an open, rather than a closed question when interviewing a patient?
Answer: Open questions allow the patient to elaborate and provide their own accounts.
3. When observing a patient, what things might you notice?
Answer: facial expression and emotional state, skin colour and integrity, behaviour or any other non-verbal sign
4. Why is it useful to adopt a process of APIE?
Answer: It facilitates patient-centred systematic delivery of patient care.
5. Why is planning important in the nursing process?
Answer: A plan allows an order for actions to be devised to help resolve a need.
6. What is the implementation part of the nursing process?
Answer: It is when the care prescribed to achieve the goal is put into action.
7. Why do you need to evaluate your care?
Answer: It is the assessment of the response to the care implemented, to ascertain if the goal is achieved and need resolved.
8. Why is a need orientated approach to care helpful to nursing?
Answer: It allows examination of a person to identify needs they might have, affording interventions to be provided to resolve the need identified.
9. What senses might you use when assessing a patient?
Answer: Speech, sight, smell, hear, touch
10. When might you use a secondary source of information rather than a direct source?
Answer: When the patient is unable to provide the necessary information, such as when they are unconscious or lack capacity.
11. Why should you not assume when a patient cries it is always because they are unhappy?
Answer: People have individual responses to different situations; one person may cry in responses to pain, being happy or relief, for example.
12. What can you do if the evaluation reveals the goal has not been achieved?
Answer: reassess as to why
13. Why is it important to work with the patient in the process of APIE?
Answer: It is crucial for person-centred care and fundamental to maintaining the patient’s best interests.
14. What might be the possible causes of a goal not being achieved?
Answer: The goal was unrealistic, the intervention ineffective or the need has changed.
15. Explain the cyclic nature of the APIE approach.
Answer: Assessment leads to planning, which leads to implementation and evaluation, which, if the gaol is not achieved, evaluation leads to reassessment, resetting goals, implementation and evaluation.