Nurses' Clinical Decision Making (PDF)

This work includes a foreword by Carl Thompson, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Health Sciences, University of York. This inspiring text offers guidance and innovative ideas for teaching and learning. It explains how nurses make clinical decisions through the development of narratives, and how, using narratives, nurses gain a far more intimate knowledge of the patient than doctors can. The book considers service delivery around patients, renegotiation of professional roles of medical staff and their boundaries of responsibility and authority. "Nurses' Clinical Decision Making" will appeal to all undergraduate and postgraduate students of nursing, registered nurses and nurse managers. Nurse educators, hospital managers, doctors and healthcare risk managers will also find the information contained here invaluable. 'If nurses are decision-makers how can their role and practice be explained? Can decision-making be taught and are there different levels of decision-making skill? If so, how can expert decision-makers be recognised? These are just some of the pertinent questions that need to be asked if we are to recognise and understand the centrality of clinical decision-making in nursing practice. Clinical work is complex and takes place in a complex environment that centres around individuals who themselves are physically, socially and spiritually complex. Clinical work also involves multiple participants (nurses, doctors, patients, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, pharmacists to name a few) who in the course of a days work can make scores of decisions.' - Russell Gurbutt, in the Preface.