Nursing practice, although seemingly focusing on the medical aspects of one’s care, expands far beyond direct medical interventions. In addition to the explicit treatment, nurses are to secure proper communication and evaluation of external socio-cultural factors that might potentially affect one’s therapy patterns. For this reason, there exists a differentiation between medical practice problems and nursing practice problems. While the former places major emphasis on the pathology of the patient’s health condition, nursing practice problems comprise the peculiarities of the patient’s assessment and response to a certain condition (Potter, Perry, Stockert, & Hall, 2018). Thus, the fundamental difference between these two approaches is the fact that nursing practice problems should tackle the notion of psychosocial health as a major contributor to one’s well-being.
For example, when the patient is admitted to the medical facility with a stroke, the primary interest in terms of medical practice would be to conduct a full scan of the condition’s pathology, including its potential causes and origin. Medical practice problems, in their turn, are focused on the aspects of caring, communication with patients and their families, cultural competence, and the overall treatment dynamics both inside and outside the facility (Potter et al., 2018). As far as the concept of PICOT is concerned, it is important to dwell on its definition and significance for the practice. Essentially, the PICOT framework is used in order to assists nurses in terms of creating a tangible and meaningful clinical inquiry. The framework includes the population of interest (P), the intervention of interest (I), the comparison of interest (C), the outcome of interest (O), and the timeframe (T) (Potter et al., 2018). When addressing this format, it becomes evident that PICOT is to be based on the nursing medical problem because it aims at analyzing the issue in both clinical and psychosocial environments for the sake of more explicit and tangible results.
Reference
Potter, P. A., Perry, A. G., Stockert, P. A., & Hall, A. (2018). Essentials for nursing practice (9th ed.) [E-book]. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier Health Sciences.