Essay On Clinical Decision Making

Clinical Decision Making

Decision making is part of our daily routine. We make decisions every day not just in our personal lives but also in our profession. As a healthcare professional, making a sound clinical decision is vital to accurately diagnosed a patient, and to establish an effective treatment intervention for them. Crist, McVay & Marocco (2016) stated that physical therapists make a myriad of decisions every day. These clinical decisions that we make impact the outcome of our treatment interventions. So, improving our clinical decision making skills is something that we need to work on every day to be able to come up with a sound clinical judgement that will be beneficial for our patient.

My clinical decision-making skills have evolved over time. I remember when

So, we have to make sure that they are patient-centered and tailored specifically for them. Klein (2005) shared 5 rules for good decision making and these are: 1. Being aware of the base rate. 2. You have to make sure that the data that you gathered are truly relevant rather than just salient or important. 3. Seek for reasons why your decisions may be wrong and entertain alternative hypothesis 4. Ask questions that would disprove, rather than confirm your current hypothesis 5. Remember that you are wrong more often than you think (p.782). These are good pointers that will help us in making our clinical decisions. Marewski & Gigerenzer (2012) discussed how heuristics help clinician make a good medical decision when faced with situations where time, knowledge and resources are limited. Heuristics are simple decision strategies that ignore part of the available information, basing decisions on only a few relevant predictors (Marewski & Gigerenzer, 2012). For me, fast-and-frugal heuristics framework can be applied when we do screens for patients who will benefit from