INTRODUCTION
High quality nursing care for children in cardiac intensive
care units (ICU) demands professional nursing knowledge and
practical skills, due to its specificity and complexity. Nurses must
be knowledgeable about the human responses of these children;
many of their responses are physiological, yet there are a multitude
of psychosocial, behavioral and family responses that are also
very important for the nurse to understand, diagnose and treat.
A thorough nursing assessment to identify signs and symptoms
provides data critical to identifying nursing-sensitive human
responses, and their etiologies; these are the clinical indicators
of nursing diagnoses (ND) as approved by NANDA International,
Inc. (NANDA-I). Nursing diagnoses represent clinical nursing
inferences and drive the identification and implementation
of treatment plans for these patients during their hospitalization.
Standardized nursing terminologies can support clinical reasoning
and decision-making processes used for quality patient
care. Therefore, we describe the nursing clinical judgment as a
basis for ND identification and development of a NIC treatment
plan for a child after cardiac surgery under intensive care.