Introduction to Health Assessment for the Nursing Professional

Abstract

“Introduction to Health Assessment for the Nursing Professional” is an open educational resource (OER) created for undergraduate nursing students at the introductory level. Educators co-curated this OER in collaboration with students for students. This resource is a unique contribution to nursing education as content is theoretically informed by health promotion in the Canadian context and by an inclusive approach to health assessment that incorporates culturally-responsive techniques related to race/ethnicity, gender/sex/sexual orientation, body sizes/types, and ability/disability. It is the first health assessment resource that is informed by clinical judgment with the goal to facilitate students’ clinical decision making and ability to prioritize care by recognizing and acting on cues and signs of clinical deterioration. Interactive clinical judgment activities and formative assessments to evaluate a student’s learning are integrated throughout the resource. The integration of clinical judgment throughout this resource will support students’ capacity to enhance patient safety and equitable health outcomes as well as their success in writing national nursing exams to become licensed to work as a Nurse.

The resource includes five chapters. The first chapter focuses on an introduction to health assessment. In this chapter, students are introduced to health assessment in the context of the related legislation, clinical judgment, priorities of care, guiding approaches, and integrative approaches to health promotion. The second chapter focuses on an inclusive approach to health assessment. This chapter is rooted in social justice and provides students with important insight into conducting health assessments from an anti-oppressive and humanistic lens. The final three chapters are focused on the respiratory, cardiovascular, and gastrointestinal systems. These chapters introduce students to subjective and objective assessments of each system with images and videos demonstrating health assessment techniques.

All of the listed OER are published under an open license. Thus, you can use them for free or modify them to suit your student and course needs with appropriate attribution. In the future, we will be adding additional chapters to the “Introduction to Health Assessment for the Nursing Professional” OER.