Develop parameters for your map. The concepts are the nursing diagnoses, medical diagnosis, expected outcomes, nursing interventions and evaluations. Use a yellow box for medical diagnosis, blue boxes for nursing diagnoses, orange for expected outcomes, pink for interventions and purple for evaluations. Link your medical and nursing diagnoses with dotted lines, your nursing diagnoses with dashed lines, your nursing diagnoses and expected outcomes with yellow lines, interventions and expected outcomes with black lines and interventions and evaluations with red lines.
Gather your information. Collect information about your patient's health problems from your patient or someone who is close to him and have a physical examination performed on him. Review his medical record for his health history, then organize and analyze your information.
Identify your priority nursing assessments. Find out what the patient's most important health problems are and write them down. These should be the most troubling signs and symptoms of his medical diagnosis. Next, draw a yellow box at the top of your paper and fill it with your patient's medical diagnosis and priority nursing assessments.
Formulate your nursing diagnoses. Identify actual and potential health problems, then write three or more priority nursing diagnoses. Write down supporting data for your nursing diagnoses. Draw blue boxes below the yellow box and label each one with a nursing diagnosis and supporting evidence for that diagnosis.
Develop a plan of care for each nursing diagnosis. Write down expected outcomes for each diagnosis. Write down the nursing interventions needed to reach each expected outcome. Draw orange boxes below the blue boxes and label each one with an expected outcome that corresponds to the nursing diagnosis above it. Put the nursing interventions for each expected outcome in a pink box below the appropriate orange box.
Implement your nursing interventions. Review the expected outcomes for your nursing diagnoses to see whether your patient has met them. For each expected outcome, write an evaluation statement to show whether he has met that expected outcome. Place your evaluation statements in purple boxes below the corresponding pink boxes.
Connect your concepts. Look for relationships among the boxes on your concept map. Boxes with similar information are related. Draw dotted lines between the yellow box and all the blue boxes. Draw dashed lines linking the blue boxes that have relationships. Draw yellow lines linking the blue boxes to the corresponding orange boxes. Draw a black line between each pink box and its appropriate orange box. Then draw red lines between your pink boxes and matching purple boxes. If you have a purple box with an evaluation statement showing an expected outcome was not met, draw a green line from that box back to the yellow box with your priority nursing assessments.
If your concept map needs to be presented on a poster board, transfer it from your paper to the board.