TITLE:
Consensus of the Characteristics of Clinical Judgement Utilised by Nurses’ in Their Practice: Results of a Survey
AUTHORS:
Sharon Jacobs, Christine Taylor, Kathleen Dixon, Lesley Wilkes
KEYWORDS:
Clinical Judgement, Characteristics, Survey, Nurses
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Nursing,
Vol.8 No.10,
October
30,
2018
ABSTRACT: Clinical judgement is an important component of safe and effective nursing care. Clinical judgement remains a challenging cognitive process to articulate and assess. An integrative review of the literature conducted in 2016 identified 13 characteristics of clinical judgement. This paper reports the results of a 2-phase survey to obtain consensus whether these characteristics identified accurately represented nurses’ perception of clinical judgement. The 2-phase survey was administered via an online survey software tool. The survey in phase 1 sought Yes/No answers for nurse academics with recruitment via a hyperlink in an email to individuals identified from University websites, Google and published articles. In phase 2, the survey was modified to a Likert scale and recruitment occurred via online networks and was open to all nurses. The results identified that the characteristics accurately represented the nurse’s perception of clinical judgement. By articulating the characteristics, it allows clinical judgement to be easily described and can therefore be applied to both nursing research and education.