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Holistic Assessment Of A Patient's Health

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Holistic assessment is known as a 'comprehensive assessment of body mind and spirit ' (chrash 2011, p.530). A holistic assessment of a patient’s health is a sructured and systematic approach to establishing the necessary level of care required (doughery & lister). the focus of this paper will be to critically explore one aspect of an assessmen carried out during the care of a patient. the relationship between practice and literature will be explored including the appraisal of the assessment process. Both objective and subjective data has been collected for this, found in appendix a, b and c.
Consent has been sought by patient, for the disclosure of his sensitive data for the purposes of this essay ( Data Protection Act 1998). Identifiable data has been withdrawn from this essay to respect patient confidentiality. Patient privacy and dignity have been maintained at all stages of the assessment (NMC 2008). In lieu of this we will refer to the patient as 'Phil '.
The assessment I have chosen to expand upon is the VAS(visual analogue scale for pain) assessment. The vas tool provides a health care worker with an indication of the intensity of pain. It consists of a 10m line with the anchor words ‘no pain’ and ‘worst pain imaginable’. This tool has been developed to add numeric indicators and also descriptive like ‘mild’ (Bijur et al 2001). The use of VAS tool post-operatively has been validated by some research (price et al 1983)and is recommended by nursing literature

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