Here’s an all-important methodology to excellent patient care, and it starts with a healthcare practitioner acronym for four key components: SOAP. What’s a A SOAP note, you ask?
A SOAP note is an easy-to-understand phrase that’s a standard way of presenting information about a patient in a specific order. It’s used by any professional healthcare school whose students teach excellence in patient care, including those seeking a doctor of chiropractic degree. SOAP refers to Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan components.
Why SOAP Notes Are Important
Learning to write accurate, concise SOAP notes is a critically important skill. SOAP notes are used as part of an office’s patient admission notes, medical histories, and other documents that are included in a patient’s chart.
Get your SOAP notes right, they say, and you’re helping your patients achieve better healthcare outcomes. Mix good SOAP notes with a chiropractic degree, and you have a great plan for a long healthcare career.
Best Practices for SOAP Notes
The idea behind SOAP centers around doctors being able to approach patient conditions in a way that leads to efficient, effective healthcare delivery. Let’s look at SOAP in detail.
S = Subjective
The S stands for subjective component, which establishes the purpose of the visit and seeks to identify a chief complaint. Sometimes there are multiple complaints, and chiropractic degree coursework and experience will help you find and focus on the most important one.
Other aspects of the subjective will include a history of present illness, guided by another standard format healthcare schools use, commonly referred to as OLDCHARTS.
O Onset of the complaint (When it started)
L Location of the complaint (Body area affected)
D Duration of the complaint (Time spent in pain)
CH Describing the character of the complaint
A Alleviating/Aggravating factors (What makes it worse or better?)
R Radiating pain or stays in one area
T Temporal (Better or worse during the day)
S Severity (Rating pain from 1-10)
O = Objective component
This SOAP section covers information the healthcare practitioner sees or can measure, such as vital signs, examinations of cardiac and respiratory systems, and other findings or notes, including notes about abnormalities and results from labs and other diagnostic tests.
A = Assessment
Assessment refers to a summary of the diagnosis (conclusion) and may include a list of other possible diagnoses from most likely to least likely.
P = Plan
The plan is the healthcare provider’s response to the patient’s symptoms or conditions. The plan covers the details and goals of therapy or treatments. When there are multiple health problems, they will typically be prioritized according to severity or urgency.
SOAP Notes and the Chiropractic Degree
Some students who haven’t had much exposure to the healthcare job sector are a bit surprised to learn those earning a doctor of chiropractic degree spend a lot of time on SOAP note procedures, just as their med school counterparts do.
Oh, did you not realize doctors of chiropractic can be someone’s primary care doctor? They can – and chiropractors are the world’s third-largest portal-of-entry (no referral) provider. That means those suffering from neck or back pain and other neuromusculoskeletal conditions can make an appointment with a chiropractor whenever they chose – no referral needed by any other doctor.
A chiropractor’s schooling is dedicated to making an accurate diagnosis and presenting patient-centered treatment recommendations.
Note This About a Chiropractic Degree
A few more points of distinction for those interested in a chiropractic degree:
About the Chiropractic Degree at CUKC
Cleveland University-Kansas City (CUKC) is a nonprofit, private, healthcare-focused university in Overland Park, Kansas, a suburb of the Kansas City metro.
Our history in chiropractic education began in 1922 when the College of Chiropractic was founded. Today, CUKC is the only chiropractic university still guided by the founding family. Nearly 8,000 chiropractors in the U.S. have a chiropractic degree from our College of Chiropractic.
Becoming a chiropractor puts you on track for a satisfying – and challenging – people-first career as a healthcare practitioner. The job outlook for chiropractors is for 7% growth from 2018 through 2028, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Now that you have a head start about SOAP notes for healthcare find out more by getting this free ebook, Your Complete Guide to the Chiropractic Profession today!