DOI: 10.1177/17449871261492939 ISSN: 1744-9871

Artificial intelligence-supported revision of nursing care plans in a standardised newborn vignette: a one-group pretest–posttest study

Aaron A Funa, Jhonner D Ricafort, Renz Alvin E Gabay

Background:

Nursing students often produce care plans that are plausible yet generic, with weak linkage among diagnoses, interventions and outcomes. Teacher-mediated, bounded generative AI may support revision while preserving clinical judgement.

Aims:

To assess whether an AI-supported Reflect–Compare–Revise workflow improves nursing care plan quality and diagnosis–intervention–outcome alignment using a standardised newborn vignette.

Methods:

A one-group pretest–posttest study involved 40 second-year nursing students at a public university in the Philippines. Students wrote an unaided care plan, then revised it using the structured workflow. Two blinded nurse-educator raters scored paired plans using the Quality of Diagnoses, Interventions and Outcomes instrument.

Results:

Post-revision documentation quality improved across all domains, with the largest raw gains in diagnostic formulation and nursing-sensitive outcomes. Interventions and outcomes remained the weaker downstream domains, with outcomes lowest at posttest. Diagnosis–intervention–outcome alignment and specificity increased, although explicit cross-linking remained inconsistent.

Conclusion:

This study adds preliminary evidence for nursing education: higher scores after guided AI-supported revision were associated with clearer and more coherent clinical reasoning in care planning. Policy recommendations are to permit bounded AI use with standardised prompts, revision logs/checklists, rubric-based feedback and verification safeguards to protect documentation integrity and patient safety.

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