Importance Of Decision Making In Nursing

Decision-making is the scientific inquiry, which was first established in the early 1950s by Edwards [24] and Hammond [25]. According to (Thomas et al 1991) decision making is a broad term, which applies the process of making a choice between options as to a course of action. Clinical decision making by health professionals is a more difficult process, requiring more of parties than making defined choices between limited options. Clinical decision making is both a result and also an element of clinical reasoning. Nurses make critical clinical decisions every day and these decisions give an effect on the patient’s health care, quality and also the actions of the healthcare providers. The Nursing and Midwifery Council clearly have identified

The relationship between experience and the ability to make complex decisions in nursing practice is a valuable contributor to clinical decision-making (Benner and Tanner 1987, Cioffi 2001). This affects the speed at which nurses can make decisions and the approach they use. As well as professional experience or ‘know-how’ knowledge, successful decision-making from an evidence-based perspective incorporates three additional elements to support the successful decision (Thompson 2002a. However, Thompson et al (2001a, 2001b) found that few sources of information accessed by nurses were research-based. The strongest piece of evidence-based practice that influenced nurses’ decision-making were human sources such as the clinical specialist and link nurses associated with the specialism under

The information procession model is rooted in medical decision making (Joseph & Patel, 1990). This model uses a scientific or hypothetical-deductive approach to assist metacognitive reasoning that is essential to medical diagnosis (Graber, 2003, Gordon & Franklin, 2003). Nurses adopted this hypothetical-deductive approach to assist clinical decision–making using decision trees to numerically assess potential outcomes. A key assumption of this theory is that the decision-maker stores relevant information in his or her memory and that effective decision-making or problem solving occurs when the problem solver retrieves information from both short- and long-term memory. The model describes a seven- stage process of ‘diagnostic reasoning’ or clinical decision-making: Exposure to pre-encounter data; Entry to the data search field and shaping the direction of data gathering; Coalescing of cues into clusters or ‘chunks’; Activating possible diagnostic explanations 
(hypotheses); Hypothesis and data-directed search of the data 
field; Testing for the correct diagnostic hypothesis;