Categorisation of the patient's medical condition--an analysis of nursing judgement.
This paper is a report of a study designed to explore the way in which community and hospital based nurses categorised 35 medical conditions. The results, obtained from a series of card-sorts using a Multiple Sorting Task and a modified Q-Sort, found that nurses used four global sub-categories of severity to categorise them. The findings provided a basis for an analysis of nursing assessment and established that they were realised as prognostic judgements. Discussion of the structure of the categories led to a possibility that the cognitive skill referred to as 'intuition' could be explained by the way in which clinical knowledge comes to be organised in memory.
University of Surrey, Department of Nursing and Midwifery, Guildford, U.K.
R
R
Crow
J
J
Spicer
D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D005544:Forecasting; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008131:London; D008568:Memory; D009733:Nursing Diagnosis; D011340:Problem Solving; D012720:Severity of Illness Index