To provide quality patient care over a period of time, nurses need a roadmap that guides their actions and quantifies desired outcomes. As a registered nurse, you will be responsible for creating a plan of care based on each patient’s needs and health goals. A nursing care plan is a formal process that includes six components: assessment, diagnosis, expected outcomes, interventions, rationale, and evaluation.¹ Documenting these steps ensures effective communication between doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals over multiple shifts.

Interventions are a key element of the nursing care plan. This guide explores nursing interventions and their role in patient care.

What Are Nursing Interventions?

Nursing interventions are actions a nurse takes to implement their patient care plan, including any treatments, procedures, or teaching moments intended to improve the patient’s comfort and health.²

These actions can be as simple as adjusting the patient’s bed and resting position—or as involved as psychotherapy and crisis counseling. While some nursing interventions are doctors’ orders, nurse practitioners can also develop orders using principles of evidence-based practice. Common nursing interventions include:

• Bedside care and assistance
• Administration of medication
• Postpartum support
• Feeding assistance
• Monitoring of vitals and recovery progress

Nursing Intervention Categories³

Nursing interventions are grouped into three categories according to the role of the healthcare professional involved in the patient’s care:

• Independent: A nurse can perform independent interventions on their own without assistance from other medical personnel; e.g., routine nursing tasks such as checking vital signs.
• Dependent: Some actions require instructions or input from a doctor, such as prescribing new medication. A nurse cannot initiate dependent interventions alone.
• Interdependent: Collaborative, or interdependent, interventions involve team members across disciplines. In certain cases, such as post-surgery, the patient’s recovery plan may require a prescription medication from a doctor, feeding assistance from a nurse, and treatment by a physical therapist or occupational therapist.

The Role of Assessments

The nursing assessment is the first step in the nursing care plan. During the assessment process, both physicians and nurses might ask questions and perform tests to gain information about a patient’s health and state of being. Professionals gather information from the patient’s:

• Vital signs
• Physical complaints or concerns
• External body conditions
• Medical history
• Current neurological functioning

After gathering all essential information during the assessment process, the nurse can use clinical judgment to formulate a nursing diagnosis. Based on the assessment and diagnosis, the nurse can develop a care plan that outlines which interventions to include.⁴ For example, a nurse diagnosis may conclude the patient has a lack of appetite due to post-surgery pain. From this diagnosis, the nurse can set goals to resolve the patient’s pain through actions such as administering pain-relief medication and assessing the patient’s pain levels every few hours.

Nursing Interventions Classification System

There are several types of nursing interventions aimed at meeting the variety of medical needs and conditions of patients. The Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC) system categorizes a wide range of possible treatments that a nurse may perform. The book Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC), 7th ed. evaluates this system, defining over 550 nursing interventions from which a nurse can choose.