What does ongoing assessment aim to do?

Ongoing assessment focuses on monitoring changes in a patient’s condition over time, which is crucial for effective patient care. This continuous process allows healthcare providers to recognize fluctuations in a patient’s health status, identify potential complications, and adjust treatment plans accordingly. By regularly evaluating a patient's progress and responses to interventions, healthcare professionals can ensure timely modifications to care, ultimately enhancing patient outcomes.

While establishing a comprehensive database is important, it is typically associated with the initial assessment phase rather than an ongoing evaluation process. Diagnosing new conditions may be part of overall assessments but is not the primary focus of ongoing assessments, which concentrate on the evolution of existing health conditions. Creating a care plan from scratch generally occurs during the initial assessment and planning stages, rather than being a primary goal of ongoing assessment.