A Psychiatric Nursing Admission Assessment Tool for Children and Adolescents

To ensure that children and adolescents receive quality care, psychiatric nurses must gather assessment data on admission that is accurate and comprehensive. This step of the nursing process is becoming more crucial as hospital stays decrease, requiring nurses to prioritize patient needs quickly and implement plans of care. The authors describe the development of a nursing admission assessment tool designed to collect data systematically on children and adolescents admitted to acute inpatient psychiatric units. Lewin's change theory (1961) is used as a framework for describing the challenges of instituting a new documentation system.