Monday, March 16, 2009

Module 4, Question1

How did the readings influence your perception of your own clinical decision making?  How do we reconcile the value of nursing experience with known heuristics and biases used in human decision making? 

The readings made me conscious of my clinical decision making because I have the experience and knowledge to take care of critically ill patients, but I haven't "experienced" every situation that may come.  I know where to turn for resources when I have a patient with an illness or disease that I haven't heard of or experienced.  In the past I have heard that experience is how nurses learn to do a better job and give excellent patient care, but it is important to incorporate evidence-based practice into your clinical practice as well as draw on past experiences.  Using previous experience and a clinical decision support system as tools to provide evidence-based care is the ideal way to make important clinical decisions.

Since people usually don't detect their own biases of judgements, this can cause mistakes and misconceptions.  If using probability without heuristics or other knowledge, systematic errors can occur.  We can reconcile the value of the nursing experience with our known heuristics and biases in human decision making by being aware of our cognitive biases and having knowledge of our internal judgemental heuristics.  By making our judgements based on our knowledge, experience, heuristics and biases, we can make better decisions under uncertainty. 

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