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.
Crow
R
R
University of Surrey, Department of Nursing and Midwifery, Guildford, U.K.
Spicer
J
J
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