[Nursing consultation for chronic patients]

Nursing consultation for chronic patients forms part of the list of primary health care services for the coverage provided and due to the general public's satisfaction. However, the content and the results offered can be improved and the need to reorient this service has been proposed for quite some time. Strategies to succeed in developing a pure nursing contribution vis-a-vis our patients' health, that which we call an independent dimension in nursing, pass through the construction of a nursing vision which many of us lack as a consequence of a structured professional development along the lines of the biomedical model in which the nursing paradigm was transmitted more in the theoretical field than in the practical. By referring to Doka and Riopelle, we analyze the stages through which a patient afflicted by a physical disease passes and the tasks which he and his family should fulfill, in order to find an equivalence between these and some of the nursing diagnoses published by the North American Nursing Diagnosis Association (NANDA). The nursing diagnoses so obtained are compared to those which a panel of experts, belonging on Methodology Commission of the Malaga Sanitary District, by consensus identified as the most prevalent among this population. The degree of coincidences was high, which encourages us to continue along this vein in the nursing consultations for chronic patients.