MRSA Nursing Diagnoses

One way that nurses formulate their perspective on a disease or condition, and also plan out the way they're going to care for you and intervene therapeutically, is through the use of something called a nursing diagnosis.

A nursing diagnosis, as opposed to a medical diagnosis, looks at something physical or psychological that you may be at risk for, that is within the scope of nursing practice to care for. Consequently, it is a little difficult to find nursing diagnoses related to MRSA specifically, because these diagnoses will be based on the full picture of the patient, and MRSA can present in many different ways.

For example, if you have a wound that is infected with MRSA and refuses to heal, the nursing diagnosis might be:

Impaired skin integrity related to delayed wound healing associated with infection.
After writing this diagnosis, the nurse may create a plan for how to intervene with the situation. In this situation with a wound, their planned interventions may include:

1) Inspect skin in contact with wound drainage for pallor, redness, and breakdown
2) Notify appropriate health care provider (e.g. physician, wound care specialist) if tissue breakdown actually occurs

Their desired outcome may be absence of redness or irritation. They will then evaluate at the end of the shift to see if they accomplished their outcome, which should be measurable.

This particular nursing plan was pulled from this website, which is a very helpful source for nursing diagnoses: http://www1.us.elsevierhealth.com/SIMON/Ulrich/Constructor/diagnoses.cfm?did=427%7C428

Other nursing diagnoses related to MRSA may include (depending on the patient):

Risk for acute/chronic pain
Risk for infection (sepsis) related to release of bacteria into the blood associated with presence of infected necrotic areas
Readiness for enhanced learning
Risk for fluid volume deficit

Nurses learn these nursing diagnoses in school because it trains their mind to think about the whole picture of you as the patient, and not just your medical diagnosis.



Source:
http://www1.us.elsevierhealth.com/SIMON/Ulrich/Constructor/diagnoses.cfm?did=427%7C428
http://www1.us.elsevierhealth.com/SIMON/Ulrich/Constructor/diagnoses.cfm?did=355