Encephalopathy Nursing Care Plan

Find the full lesson here: https://academy.nursing.com/lesson/nursing-care-plan-ncp-for-encephalopathy/

This here is the nursing care plan for encephalopathy. So, the pathophysiology. Encephalopathy is a general term for disease of the brain tissue. It's a syndrome of brain dysfunction caused by damage to brain tissue and failure. This damage can be done by atrophy, lack of oxygen, edema, or toxins. So some nursing considerations, there are a few things that we want to consider when taking care of these patients, we want to consider putting them on seizure precautions. So we want these patients to be protected. The best way to do that is with seizure precautions. We want to do vital signs. We want to monitor their vitals. 

We want to do frequent neuro checks and if available and if necessary, we would need to monitor their ICP. And we want to draw labs; more importantly, ammonia and finding levels to see if that is the root cause. The desired outcome for these patients is to treat or reverse the cause in order to restore proper brain function, it returns the patient to their usual baseline mental status. So when this patient comes in to you, this encephalopathic patient comes in to see you. There's going to be a few things that we see, but there's going to be some things that either them or their family tells us. Some of the subjective data that we see is that they are going to complain about mood or personality changes.