The importance of the Advanced Physical Health Assessment to nurses is an ability to advance professional skills a nurse has. The consequences of using advanced physical assessment skills are associated with identifying key health areas for improvement, challenging interpretations, and perseverance. When a nurse practitioner performs a head-to-toe physical assessment, he or she will be able to understand the specific needs and problems of a patient and thus refer them to further treatment. When applying a systematic approach to head-to-toe assessments, nurses will be able to foster good relationships with patients while also practicing efficiency. Since each patient is unique, the more assessments nurses perform, the more experience they will get. In addition to this, it is important to assess patients from head-to-toe due to the possibility of finding complications or unnoticed problems of which patients may have no knowledge. This results in not only correct diagnoses of illnesses and possible co-morbidities but also in the enhancement of nurses’ knowledge and their further collaboration with the multidisciplinary team.
When conducting head-to-toe assessments, nurses also practice new equipment, approaches, and tools in order to understand what kind of treatment is preferable for a particular patient. Moreover, it helps to use medical records in a more effective way. The assessment provides a methodology for the nurses to use the official medical records to learn everything about the patient in terms of physical and mental health. Additionally, nurses can create medical records using new methods, language, databases to create a reliable database of the patients. In other words, the systematic application of physical health assessments makes each type of communication more beneficial and flexible to use for the therapists and nurses. Furthermore, the increasing volumes of digital data in medical facilities only prove that communication and interactions with data are important.
In my professional activity, physical assessments can be very helpful. The modern health care system heavily relies on electronics and devices which make medical manipulations easier, faster, and more effective for both the patient and the nurse. Hence, it encourages me to use something new and learn about the new piece of equipment before utilizing it on a daily basis. With the help of new equipment and technologies, the advanced practice nursing knowledge can be used to collect the information about patients’ health histories and physical assessments for identifying trends related to various patient populations. Nurses can contribute with their knowledge through uploading data into electronic health records, and statistical analysis can be used to find correlations between demographic characteristics of patient populations and the diagnoses made with the help of physical examinations.
Shadow Health is a great software which helps students to simulate real-life situations. However, the major advantage of this software is an ability to gain experience without causing any harm to the patient. Surely, it cannot be a perfect alternative to the real-life issues. Nonetheless, the program prepares students and helps them to adjust to the working environment. The students make mistakes which can result in the decrease of care quality while the program erases the harm, as it uses artificial intelligence as its patient. Hence, students are able to test their skills, knowledge, and experience in the simulated reality to see their levels of proficiency and learn more about the situation before it occurs in a real setting.