Developing Clinical Judgement: The Building Blocks of Quality Nursing Care
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Abstract
Introduction/Purpose: Developing clinical judgment is a skill necessary to provide safe, quality patient care yet, it is a skill that cannot be taught. The development of clinical judgment occurs only after a nurse has experienced several situations frequently and can reflect on these scenarios to synthesize and evaluate the nursing process at work. Incorporating a task-layered, married state model into the senior nursing practicum experience can provide the repetitive, frequent experiences needed to enhance clinical judgment development while also offering a supportive, joint approach to patient care while working with an experienced nurse.
Methods: Using quantitative data from the Lasater Clinical Judgement Rubric, this project assessed and analyzed the preceptor perspective of senior nursing students' pre- and postintervention clinical judgment scores.
Results: Qualitative data was abstracted from pre- and post-intervention surveys completed by the nurse preceptors. The data was arranged to identify a mean score for both pre-and postintervention surveys. The data was used in a paired t-test, which identified whether a correlation between clinical judgment development and a task-layered, married-state approach to the senior practicum experience existed.
Discussion: This project sought to understand a potential solution for the development of clinical judgment in pre-licensure nursing students. Healthcare organizations may consider partnering with nursing schools to standardize the teaching approaches used during the senior practicum experience. This may also strengthen the pipeline of newly licensed nurses for an organization and assist in closing the staffing gap most organizations are facing due to the COVID-19 pandemic.