Nurse Practitioner and Nurse

Health Assessment Skills

The National Organization of Nurse Practitioner Faculty (NONPF, 2013) notes that one vital competency for nurse practitioners to obtain is the ability to use advanced health assessment skills in order to differentiate between normal, variations of normal, and abnormal findings. This is a vital competency for nurse practitioners in primary care nursing because it is part of the leadership approach that an NP is expected to practice. Obtaining this competency ensures that the NP is able to practice independently and manage patients accordingly.

Douglas, Osborne, Reid et al. (2014) point out the importance of using advanced health assessment skills in their study of the barriers that nurses face when applying assessment scales. What they find is that nurses can both help patients and the nursing organization by applying accurate assessments, as these assist the patient in obtaining the right type of care and they support the overall aims of the organization in terms of achieving goals and meeting patient expectations.

Smith, Curtis, Wardle et al. (2013) show that advanced health assessment skills can lead to greater health literacy and both enable patient empowerment and support quality of care outcomes. Differentiating between normal, variations of normal and abnormal findings is equally important because the nurse can better inform the patient as to what steps should be taken following the assessment. If the nurse practitioner is unable to distinguish between these groups, the patient could be led to a course of action that is either unnecessary or even harmful, depending upon the assessment and the actual reality of the patient's presentation.

As Birks, Cant, Chung et al. (2013) note, not all assessment skills will be used by nurse practitioners in their practice -- but that does not change the fact that having these skills is essential to providing quality care. Their study on the use of assessment skills by nurses and the training that nurses receive in their graduate coursework indicates that nurses are given more training than they may actually utilize in their practice but that this training helps to cover all the bases and provide the nurse practitioner with an understanding of every level of assessment so that the patient's best interests are always placed at the fore.