How Nurses make clinical decisions?

When a nurse is confronted with clinical problems, the nurse must adhere to organized, tried and tested processes to make a clinical decision. While there may be several different ways to implement these processes. The first thing to do would be to identify and understand the problem, Next the objective must be made clear as to the steps taken to rectify the problem, Priorities must be set in the in the application of the process, The steps taken must be able to solve the problem, processes and produced used must conform to approved techniques and treatments, negative aspects of the processes must also be taken into consideration and  finally the intervention must be assessed for effectiveness.

Critical thinking and advocacy are the main components of making and applying clinical decisions. Critical thinking envisages the capability and knowledge and collecting data in a manner to make a sound decision by applying accumulated experience and sound learning. Critical thinking cannot be described as a skill and all skills require an inborn capability to think critically, but becoming an expert in any procedure and discipline requires a very high degree of expertise combined with study and practice. The essential skill and practice must endow the nurse with the knowledge to achieve objectives which is only possible with hard work and dedication.

As the nurse gains tenure in her profession, it makes it much easier for her to concentrate and understand fully the available data and the probable conclusions are narrowed down so that the process of elimination of unrequited information is achieved quicker. This saves a lot of time and gives the nurse the required time to consider new or additional processes and consider possibilities that may not have been obvious before.  The time period for the acquisition of the extensive experience and knowledge can be well spent be increasing professional knowledge and expertise.           Several articles and documents from the American Association of College of Nursing can be used for collecting data.  The research showed that several important topics that were relevant to this concept.

This included Kolcaba’s concept of “comfort” which includes relief, ease and transcendence which means beyond the limits of ordinary nursing experience.  The nursing concept contained literature from other fields including nursing, medicine psychology psychiatry and ergonomics. Other nursing theories are Leninger’s Nursing Theory of Cultural care and Watson’s theory of human care.   However, due to the limited quantity of available empirical studies of nursing theories many nurses do not have extensive knowledge and how to carry out the challenging task of patient care according to the scientific theories.