Clinical Judgment And Decision-Making In Nursing

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For my assignment I am going to talk about two vital skills in nursing; clinical judgement and decision making. Clinical judgement is the conclusion or enlightened opinion at which a nurse arrives following a process of observation, reflexion and analysis of observable or available information or data (Ankner, 2012). Clinical judgement is vital in nursing so that errors are avoided and that the best possible care is given to the client. Clinical judgement is defined as not only being able to make a decision competently and implementing it but also having the ability to justify why you made that decision within the clinical setting(Dowie and Elstein, 1988). Clinical judgement is vital in nursing care for the nurse to be able to give the best…show more content…
It is an essential concept of nursing and it is essential that the nurse develops competent decision making skills. There are three approaches to clinical decision making; normative, descriptive and prescriptive. Normative decision making is the way it should be done, descriptive is the way it is done and finally prescriptive is the way it could be done better (O'Carroll and Park, 2007). Decisions are made on a number of things including the best available evidence, the reasoning and also the analysis or request for information. There are also two perspectives in decision making and these are the humanistic and deductive perspectives. The humanistic perspective is the science of nursing and the deductive perspective is the art of nursing (Standing, 2010).In order for a nurse to make a diagnosis on a client and to make an effective clinical judgement and decision the nurse must first gather information on the client through their mental, physical and medical history and then go on to develop a list of possible causes for the client’s illness. Clinical decision making does not have to be carried out in a clinical setting but can be carried out in many places such as the client’s home, their general practice or even the ward office. There is a process in which clinical judgement is made effectively. This is observation, reasoning, critical thinking and clinical judgement (Standing,…show more content…
Every decision a nurse makes impacts on the patient therefore the nurse needs to continually question whether their decision was the best decision for the patient and also the safest one to promote recovery for the patient. Nurses need to be able to make well-reasoned decisions that are responsive to the client’s needs to promote recovery. This cannot be done effectively without displaying well-reasoned and effective clinical judgement and decision making. The nurse must also be able to justify, explain and defend the decision that they made (Varcarolis and Halter,

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