Thoughts

Healthcare professionals strive to provide the highest and quality care to patients that would guarantee improved patient outcome and satisfaction. As a result, understanding the patient’s health functional patterns becomes essential since the professionals are able to understand the nature and history of a given health condition on a patient. Khatiban, Tohidi, and Shahdoust (2019) explain that functional health patterns developed by Gordon are one of the comprehensive models for the assessment stage of the nursing process. Functional patterns help to summarize the overall health issues on a given patient. Understanding the patient’s functional pattern would help in identifying various causal factors to diseases and hence providing a basis for treatment. Sharing the patient’s history also unmasks the health issues in patients. According to Whitney (2018) it would be appropriate to understand the patient’s functional pattern since it would help in understanding the nutritional, physical activity and mental behavior of the patients. A clear analysis of functional patterns would help to identify whether the patients prioritize health, or prioritize material possessions that destroys the brains. Nurses are able to understand whether the patients engage in regular physical activities, has been able to coup up with mental and cognitive issues, sexuality issues, elimination behaviors as well as having appropriate relationship patterns.

An example of elimination complexity is pancreatitis which can be chronic or acute (Whitney, 2018). Acute pancreatitis appears suddenly and lasts for days while, chronic pancreatitis occurs over many years. Pancreatitis occurs when digestive enzymes become activated while still in the pancreas, irritating the cells of pancreas and causing inflammation. It is caused by excessive alcohol consumption, cigarette smoking, obesity, family history of pancreatitis and other biliary tract disorders (Clinic, 2020). Using the functional patterns assessment, the nurse is able to determine the causes that contributed to pancreatitis. Educating the patient about their disease process will help the patient understand the symptoms and what makes the condition better or worse. If pancreatitis was contributed by lifestyle choices then the nurse is able to educate the patient on quitting alcohol or smoking, losing weight and if it is family history the nurse can educate the family about pancreatitis and which symptoms they are to look for and pancreatitis complications such as kidney failure, diabetes, pancreatic cancer and infections (Clinic, 2020).