[Towards integrated care. Nursing assessment of a "complex" patient using intermed]

Nurses are confronted with an increasing number of patients with complex health care needs. INTERMED (INTERdisciplinary MEDicine) is described here as an action oriented method to document the potential «complexity» of patients, summarising information on biological, psychological, social and health care domains, plotted on a time-axis (history, current state and prognoses). A 73 year old patient assessed with this tool on admission to an internal medicine ward is described. INTERMED identified that besides age, mental health problems were interfering with somatic state and identified the patient as a complex case. From an integral health care perspective, coordinated care was needed to focus on the psychological vulnerability of the patient that made the somatic state more complex, including all the health care providers involved. Complex patients are an important and interesting issue for today's nurses, challenging their ability for management, organisation and coordination of care beyond standard care and the INTERMED tool can be crucial in this development.