Nursing Intuition In Nursing

Intuition based clinical decision-making is described as nurses using unintentional thought processes without second guessing to form a care plan for their patients. Nursing intuition is not just a gut feeling, but it is a cognitive based clinical skill. Due to its intangible nature intuition is often disregarded and rejected as a competent way of knowing. However research has shown it is a valid decision-making tool that yields in early recognition of ill patients, and, therefore, increases the speed of rapid response teams and appropriate care. Robert et al. (2014) conducted a conceptual analysis on the idea of intuition related to clinical decision-making among nurses

Method

Concepts are derived from attributes and are a statement based

The first concept is that intuition is an abstract concept in a field based in science, knowledge and facts. The authors conclude that intuition is indeed a cognitive skill that nurses use to make clinical decisions and that nursing intuition has been identified by nursing theorist as a way of knowing. Another concept of nursing intuition is that it enhances the time of response to patient needs and the delivery of care. The authors relate that intuition is imperative for the rapid assessment and team mobilization for deteriorating patients, and that research shows that patients display evidence of deterioration in their condition 6-8 hours prior to decompensation to a critical level. Another concept of intuition stated in the article is that intuition is the ability to provide an appropriate response not based upon a physical finding as it emerges from sensory sources and is often based on previous situations. Models related to the concept of intuition suggest that there are phases of development of intuition based upon experience, such as novice nurses making decisions based more on facts, while expert practitioners respond more automatically related to intuition. Nurses use rapid assessment of patient, behaviors, and word choice in combination with previous experiences to form care plans. They, however, lack the ability to define how they reached those decisions, therefore indicating that those

Examples of different cases to demonstrate the concept of the intuition are described by Roger et al (2014). The model case describes an example of the concept in which all defining attributes of the concept are displayed. A related case is then identified where it illustrates some form of the concept, but not all defining attributes are present. Lastly, the contrary case is present which defines what the concept is not, due to none of the defining attributes being present. The model case describes a nurse whose assessment included all of the defining attributes. In the related case the nurse based knowledge from a holistic assessment and synthesized previous experiences and observation, however, did not have immediate knowledge, rather based her clinical decisions from a factual standpoint. In the contrary case presentation the nurse, who was a new graduate, used no defining attributes of intuition and based care strictly on knowledge from a textbook and his