The NCD prompt pattern

Mental Model

Prompting is like an SBAR handover — clear about the role, context, task, boundaries, and verification check.

5 Core Building Blocks

Role & Audience → Assess (Context) → Plan (Task) → Implement (Rules) → Evaluate (Checks).

Interactive Practice

Try assembling your own prompt in the Interactive Prompt Playground.

A good prompt is like a good handover: clear about the situation, the goal and what you need back. The NCD pattern has five parts, and you can remember them through the nursing process.

Interactive prompt anatomy

Tap or hover over each highlighted part of the prompt below to see how the five elements work together:

Interactive Prompt ExplorerTap or hover each highlighted phrase to inspect how it works

“You are helping a . Please grounded in , formatted as . .”

1. Role & Audience

Tell the AI who it is assisting and who the output is for (e.g., "helping a community nurse write for a family carer" or "helping a Year 2 student revise"). This sets reading age, clinical depth, and person-centred tone.

The five parts mapped to the nursing process

Part	Ask yourself	Example wording
Role and audience	Who should the AI write as, and for whom?	"You are helping a community nurse write for a carer with no clinical background."
Assess: context	What does it need to know? Anonymised and minimal.	"The person is an older adult recovering at home after a hip operation."
Plan: task	What exactly should it produce?	"Draft a one-page guide to moving safely around the home."
Implement: rules	What must it do or avoid?	"Plain English, reading age 9. No medication advice. Use 'you', not 'the patient'."
Evaluate: checks	How will you check it? Ask it to help.	"After the draft, list anything a nurse must verify before sharing it."

Copy-paste template

Reusable 5-Part TemplateWorks in Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini

The NCD Prompt Pattern

Role and audience: You are helping [role] write for [audience].
Context: [anonymised, minimal background]
Task: [exactly what to produce, with format and length]
Rules: [what to include, what to avoid, tone, reading level]
Checks: After your answer, list what a nurse should verify,
and anything you were unsure about.

Why the final "checks" part matters

Asking the AI to list what needs verifying doesn't make it reliable. It can miss its own errors. But it builds the habit of evaluating before using, and it often surfaces assumptions you can then test. Always do your own checking as well. See Ways of knowing.