1. Assess your patient's respiratory status. Asthma causes bronchospasm, a condition that results in constriction of the airways. This can lead to a compromise in an asthmatic patient's ability to breathe and take in oxygen. Check your patient for conversational dyspnea, use of accessory muscles to breathe, flaring nostrils, chest retractions, anxiety and breath sounds. Do this, to find out how severe your patients asthma attack is and to determine your next course of action.
Write nursing diagnoses for your asthma patient. Use the information you gathered during your assessment to formulate your nursing diagnoses. Examples of nursing diagnoses for asthma are; ineffective airway clearance; ineffective breathing pattern, anxiety and deficient knowledge. Ensure that each nursing diagnosis is supported by assessment evidence.
Determine the goals of your care. Decide on what you expect the outcome of your nursing interventions will be. Then write specific nursing interventions for your asthmatic patient. Some interventions for an asthmatic patient includes raising the head of the bed to reduce the work of breathing, administering prescribed medications, teaching pursed lip breathing to release trapped air and increasing fluid intake for airway clearance.
Evaluate your patient's response to your nursing interventions. Monitor your patient's respiratory pattern for improvement, assess his lung sounds for the presence or absence of secretions and find out if his anxiety level has gone down. Check for ineffective interventions and change them by reassessing and going through the nursing process again