Evidence-Based Approach to Patients\' Conditions:

Evidence-based Approach to Patients' Conditions:

Nurses usually work with cognitively impaired, depressed, angry, and anxious patients on a daily basis. Generally, nurses working in general practice come into contact with individuals with impaired health and reduced quality of life because of various conditions such as anger, anxiety, and depression. As a result, nurses are increasingly required to become experts in diagnosing and managing the care of patients with such characteristics. This process involves the identification of signs and symptoms of these conditions, asking the right questions, and engaging in difficult conversations with their patients. Due to the varying conditions of patients, care giving by nurses and other medical practitioners take various forms. Together with other medical practitioners, nurses work with sick, older, and disabled individuals, friends, and family members. The ability of nurses to deal with these conditions effectively requires the application of evidence-based practice in diagnosis, treatment, and management of the illnesses.

Anxiety, Depression, Anger, and Cognitive Impairment:

Depression and anxiety can be considered as the most common psychiatric illnesses or disorders with the highest prevalence being in young adulthood. These disorders seem to appear at higher levels in individuals suffering from chronic diseases like diabetes, cardiac disease, and arthritis. Even though the disorders can carry a high disease burden, the disability and role impairment that is evident in chronic medical conditions is usually linked to comorbidity with the psychiatric conditions (Katz, 2010).

Depression is usually characterized with feelings of sadness, moody, and low sometimes as the feelings occur for lengthy periods of time and at intense levels. The main difference between clinical depression and being depressed is that it's more than the temporal feelings of unhappiness but a constant feeling, which is a life struggle. On the contrary, anxiety is a constant sense of worry, fear, and stress that continues to affect an individual even when the cause of these feelings is absent. Since it's not just simple feelings of being tensed and worried, anxiety has significant impacts on the way individuals feel, think, and behave.

Cognitive impairment is a broad term that is used to refer to various impaired brain function linked with the ability of an individual to concentrate, think, reason, remember, create ideas, react to emotions, and problem-solve. As a result, this condition is associated with several disorders and disabilities such as acquired brain injury, dementia, learning disabilities, and autism. Anger is a condition that is likely to occur in a patient due to frustrations associated with a certain condition. In this case, the anger and frustration is considered as a serious medical condition because it's likely to contribute to depression.

Dealing with Cognitively Impaired, Anxious, Angry, and Depressed Patients:

Since cognitive impairment, anger, anxiety, and depression as serious clinical conditions that affect the delivery of effective patient care, there is an increased need to manage the physical and mental conditions during patient care. The need to manage these conditions, especially mental or psychological situations has contributed to the need to develop clinical interventions and evidence-based practices. Evidence-based practices are crucial in the establishment of effective clinical interventions that help in dealing with anxious, angry, cognitively impaired, and depressed patients.

The need for evidence-based practice also originates from the fact that psychotherapeutic interventions are likely to be less effective for patients with these conditions, especially those with cognitive impairment (Bartels et al., 2003, p. 972). On the contrary, pharmacological and psychosocial interventions are likely to contribute to different outcomes for these patients. Therefore, evidence-based practices act the most suitable approach for handling situations where patients are cognitively impaired, angry, anxious, and depressed. The use of evidence-based practices in handling these conditions requires various approaches including & #8230;

Screening for the Conditions:

The initial phase of handling patients who are angry, anxious, depressed and cognitively impaired is to screen for these conditions. However, the screening of patients for these conditions necessitates the inclusion of brief screening questions into a health systems review at the medical visit because patients may be embarrassed or unwilling to show concerns or talk about their mental distress or health. The inclusion of the questions into the health systems review can help to facilitate early discovery and intervention and communicating to patients about concerns on their overall health. Many people with these mental conditions tend be unwilling to consult their care providers because of the stigma linked to the conditions and the lack of effective treatments available (Haddad, Buszewicz & Murphy, n.d.).

The other approach that can be taken to screen for these conditions is to administer validated screening measures in the waiting room. In this case, the screening measures even as brief scales have been identified to be effective in discovering the problems. The validated screen measures are very helpful in identifying these conditions because they are usually practical in high volume centres with regards to the distribution, gathering, and scoring the scale.

In handling these situations, I will conduct validated screening measures in the waiting room to help the patients recognize symptoms or difficulties. This will be followed by further examination to determine severity, level of interference, and persistence.

Early Clinical Intervention:

The second step in dealing with these patient conditions is early intervention in the clinic to help the patient. The process of early intervention in clinic is geared towards normalizing the experience through explaining the condition and common occurrence with chronic illness or acute symptoms, especially if the patient has difficulty in coping with the condition. Early clinical intervention is an important step in this process since effective coping can enhance health, functioning, and equality of life. Moreover, this stage enables the care giver or nurse to emphasize the need to deal with these concerns about mental health.

When carrying out this stage, the process will focus on practical problem-solving and involving the patient in valued and enjoyable daily activities despite of emotional distress since effective approaches for managing anger, anxiety, depression, and cognitive impairment involves these kinds of activities. However, for more severe or interfering symptoms of these conditions on a patient, early clinical treatment will incorporate the use of more specific treatment. The determination of the appropriate clinical intervention requires reviewing treatment options with the patient.