CLINICAL DECISION-MAKING OF EXPERIENCED AND NOVICE NURSES

Decision making is an important daily nursing activity. Given contradi ctory part findings concerning the ease of use of cognitive schema for reaching decisions among experts and novices, we chose to examine con sistency of information as a parameter that may clarify the process of decision making. Ninety-two experienced nurses and 65 nursing student s rated their decisional difficulty and levels of certainty in reachin g a diagnosis for two scenarios: one including consistent information and one providing information that was partly inconsistent with the gi ven diagnosis. For the consistent information, students showed more di fficulty and less certainty in the given diagnosis than the experience d nurses. The inconsistent scenario war perceived as more difficult by nurses in comparison to students. The cognitive processes responsible for these results are discussed.