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Nursing Documentation in the Digital Age: How Nurses Shape Smarter EHRs Through DARP, FOCUS, and Discrete Data

  DARP and FOCUS documentation are powerful narrative frameworks, but they reach their full potential only when they work in partnership with discrete documentation (flowsheets, structured assessments, and coded forms) inside the Electronic Health Record (EHR). When nurses understand how these elements complement each other, they can lead the evolution of EHRs so that digital systems genuinely support and showcase nursing practice. DARP and FOCUS: structured stories, not “extra charting” DARP (Data, Action, Response, Plan) and FOCUS (often documented as F‑DAR or F‑DARP) organize narrative notes around what is clinically significant, rather than around the clock. Data: Key subjective and objective assessment findings related to a specific focus or problem. Action: Interventions, teaching, advocacy, collaboration, and coordination. Response: How the person, family, or environment responded—changes in risk, mood, engagement, or status. Plan: Clear next steps to continue, adjust, or ...
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Seeing Beyond Stigma — Inclusion, Documentation, and the Ethics of Care

In this third article of Seeing Beyond the Stigma: Nursing Practice at the Margins, the story no longer begins with “What is stigma?” or “Who are Alex and Sharna?” We have already explored those questions (if you haven’t, go read articles 1 and 2 of this series). Their missed doses, late arrivals, and visible distress are now understood as part of lives shaped by poverty, trauma, and structural inequity, not as simple “noncompliance.” The work at this stage is different: it is about what nurses do with that knowledge in the flow of everyday practice, especially in the moments when documentation, policy, and split‑second judgments either deepen exclusion or open the door to more just and inclusive care. From Recognition to Responsibility  In the earlier posts, stigma was named as more than a personal attitude: it was framed as a social process in which people are labelled, stereotyped, separated, and pushed into lower status in ways reinforced by power. Link and Phelan’s description...
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