CATEGORIZATION OF THE PATIENTS MEDICAL CONDITION - AN ANALYSIS OF NURSING JUDGMENT

This paper is a report of a study designed to explore the way in which community and hospital based nurses categorised 35 medical conditions . The results, obtained from a series of card-sorts using a Multiple S orting Task and a modified Q-Sort, found that nurses used four global sub-categories of severity to categorise them. The findings provided a basis for an analysis of nursing assessment and established that they were realised as prognostic judgements. Discussion of the structure o f the categories led to a possibility that the cognitive skill referre d to as 'intuition' could be explained by the way in which clinical kn owledge comes to be organised in memory.