Free · AI-assisted · Nursing diagnoses · Print-friendly

Care Plan Builder — PES, goals, NIC, evaluation.

Pick your nursing diagnoses (up to 6). Add what you know about the patient. Get a full evidence-based care plan: a problem statement (problem, cause, signs), SMART goals, 4-6 high-yield nursing interventions per diagnosis with rationales, real recent peer-reviewed citations pulled live from PubMed, and a numbered reference list — plus evaluation criteria. Print-friendly for clinicals.

Do not enter PHI. No patient names, MRNs, DOBs, or exact ages. Use age bands (Pediatric / Adult / Older Adult) and de-identified diagnosis labels. See our HIPAA alignment notes.

1 Patient context (all optional)

The more context you give, the more tailored the plan. Leave anything blank that doesn't apply.

Age band

Gender (optional)

Primary medical diagnosis (no PHI)

Comorbidities / secondary diagnoses (optional)

Mobility

Code status

Language / communication

Setting

Other context (optional)

2 Pick nursing diagnoses (up to 6)

Search by name or symptom. Click to add. Already used the symptoms→diagnosis finder? Just pick the same ones here.

3 Build your plan

I confirm I'm not entering PHI, and I understand this is an educational AI-generated care plan — not clinical documentation. I'll verify every diagnosis, goal, intervention, and citation against the source before clinical use. Terms · Privacy

Citation sources — real research is pulled live from the databases you choose

PubMed / MEDLINE (NIH/NLM — journal articles, RCTs, guidelines) Cochrane systematic reviews (via Europe PMC — highest-tier evidence) USPSTF recommendations (US prevention/screening · activates once enabled on the server)

Citations are always retrieved, never invented. If a source returns nothing on-topic, the plan still uses the standard nursing taxonomy and clinical-guideline labels.

Building your care plan…

Cross-referencing standard nursing-diagnosis frameworks and current guidelines.

How this works

When you generate a plan, the tool searches two well-established, free research databases in real time for recent peer-reviewed research tied to each diagnosis: PubMed/MEDLINE (the NIH/U.S. National Library of Medicine) and Europe PMC, which includes the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. It then writes the plan from that evidence plus the standard nursing taxonomy and current clinical practice guidelines. These are the same sources nursing programs rely on (PubMed/MEDLINE, Cochrane, NIH/NLM, plus guideline bodies like AHRQ). An optional guideline source — the USPSTF (US prevention/screening recommendations) — can be turned on as well, using the checkbox above. It can only cite studies it actually retrieved: every citation is a real article with a working link — a PubMed link for journal articles, a DOI link for Cochrane reviews — numbered [1], [2]… on the interventions and listed in a References section at the end of your plan. The AI never invents a citation, title, author, PMID, or DOI, and never fabricates patient specifics — if it can't verify a source, it leaves it out. Goals are SMART, with measurable parameters and timeframes.

Because the research citations are pulled fresh for each plan, they appear with the plan you generate — not in a fixed list here. The titles below are the foundational nursing-taxonomy, drug-reference, and standards sources that anchor the tool's terminology and guideline labels.

Core source library

Herdman, T. H., Kamitsuru, S., & Lopes, C. T. (Eds.). (2024). NANDA International nursing diagnoses: Definitions and classification 2024-2026 (13th ed.). Thieme.

Note: The diagnosis names are the common terms nurses use; the goals, interventions, and rationales are generated for education. "NANDA-I" is a registered trademark of NANDA International, Inc.; "NOC" and "NIC" are owned by Elsevier. BrainSheets is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by these organizations. The texts below are listed as authoritative references.

Moorhead, S., Swanson, E., Johnson, M., & Maas, M. L. (Eds.). (2024). Nursing outcomes classification (NOC): Measurement of health outcomes (7th ed.). Elsevier.

Wagner, C. M., Butcher, H. K., & Clarke, M. F. (Eds.). (2024). Nursing interventions classification (NIC) (8th ed.). Elsevier.

Vallerand, A. H., & Sanoski, C. A. (2025). Davis's drug guide for nurses (19th ed.). F. A. Davis.

Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. (2024). Lippincott nursing procedures (10th ed.). Wolters Kluwer.

Skidmore-Roth, L. (2024). Mosby's nursing drug reference (37th ed.). Elsevier.

American Nurses Association. (2021). Nursing: Scope and standards of practice (4th ed.). ANA.

The Joint Commission. (2024). 2024 Hospital National Patient Safety Goals. Joint Commission Resources.

American Geriatrics Society Beers Criteria® Update Expert Panel. (2023). American Geriatrics Society 2023 updated AGS Beers Criteria® for potentially inappropriate medication use in older adults. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 71(7), 2052–2081.

Cochrane Collaboration. Cochrane Library — systematic reviews of healthcare interventions. www.cochranelibrary.com