The process of conducting a physical assessment: a nursing perspective

Physical assessment is a new responsibility for many nurses in the UK who are expanding their parameters of advanced clinical practice. A physical assessment framework can be used by both community and acute care nurses as a guide to the process of conducting a physical assessment. The framework presented here consists of the following sequence of steps: identifying the purpose of the assessment; taking a health history; choosing a comprehensive or focused approach; and examining the patient using the sequence of inspection, palpation, percussion and auscultation. The next step, interpretation of the clinical findings, which results in either the recognition of abnormality or identification of a differential diagnosis, then becomes the basis for clinical decision making. This paper describes a comprehensive, head-to-toe assessment as one example of the application of this physical assessment framework in clinical practice.