While using the nursing process, a nurse formulates nursing diagnoses based on which of the following?

GMCH Nursing Officer-2025

Nursing Foundation

Easy

Appeared in: GMCH Nursing Officer-2025

Explanation

The nursing process consists of five sequential steps: Assessment, Diagnosis, Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADPIE).
The Diagnosis step involves analyzing the data collected during the initial Assessment phase to identify the patient's health problems.
This assessment data is categorized into subjective data (what the patient says) and objective data (what the nurse observes or measures).
A nursing diagnosis is a clinical judgment about the patient's response to a health problem, derived directly from the analysis of this subjective and objective data.

Option A: A physician's diagnosis identifies a disease or pathology. While it informs nursing care, it is not the basis for a nursing diagnosis, which focuses on the patient's response to that disease.
Option B: This is essentially the medical diagnosis. Nursing diagnoses are concerned with the patient's holistic response (physical, psychological, social) to a medical problem, not just the problem itself.
Option D: The treatment plan is created in the Planning phase, which comes after the Diagnosis phase. The nursing diagnosis is a key input for developing the plan, not the other way around.

Visual 1: Flowchart - A diagram showing the five steps of the nursing process (ADPIE) with an arrow pointing from Assessment to Diagnosis, illustrating that the output of assessment (data) is the input for diagnosis.

Clinical Relevance

Nursing practice connection: Knowing Nursing Process: Diagnosis Phase helps nurses interpret findings accurately and avoid errors in routine assessment, medication administration, and patient teaching.
Accurate formulation of nursing diagnoses is a core competency and legal responsibility of a registered nurse. It is the foundation for all subsequent nursing care.
A precise diagnosis based on thorough assessment ensures that nursing interventions are targeted, effective, and patient-centered, leading to better health outcomes.
What if? If a nurse bases a diagnosis on an assumption instead of data (e.g., assuming an elderly patient's confusion is dementia without assessing for a urinary tract infection), the resulting care plan will be ineffective and potentially harmful, as the true underlying problem (the infection) will go untreated.

How to Approach the Question

First, identify the core concept of the question, which is the 'nursing process'.
Recall the five steps of the nursing process in order: Assessment, Diagnosis, Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADPIE).
Understand that the process is sequential; the output of one step is the input for the next.
The question asks for the basis of the 'Diagnosis' step. This means you need to identify what information is used to formulate a nursing diagnosis.
The Diagnosis step analyzes the data collected during the Assessment step.
Evaluate the options: 'Subjective and objective assessment data' directly describes the information gathered during the Assessment phase, making it the correct basis for diagnosis. The other options relate to medical diagnoses or later steps in the process.

Concept Tested & Keywords

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