Introduction
Clinical Decision making makes a critical part of medical education especially in this era
of evidence-based medical practice. Graduating
... [Show More] health professionals must thus have these critical
skills in order to enhance the quality-of-care delivery because of the uncertainty and errors
associated with the current health environment (Nibbelink & Brewer, 2018). It is a professional
skill that all healthcare service providers, including doctors, physicians, nurse practitioners, and
other healthcare service providers, must possess to deliver quality and safe clinical services. The
clinical decision-making process is multivariate, comprising three phases entailing the diagnosis,
the assessment of the severity, and finally, the management of the condition. While there a lot of
research around the area of clinical decision making in the elderly patients in the ED, the reviews
show little notion regarding conceptualization of this skill (Taylor et al., 2018). This necessitates
further research to establish the importance and complexity, factors that influences the decisions,
roles of health professionals, impact on patient care, theories at play and importance evidencebased practice. The paper therefore reflects on clinical decision making in Mr. Elis’s case with a
view of its complexity, importance and factors, learning outcomes and factors that play a great
part in these decisions.
The Value and Difficulty of Decision Making
Nibbelink & Brewer (2018) noted that nursing experience and associated factors like
organization and unit culture, education, understanding of patients, situational awareness and
autonomy greatly impact on clinical decisions. This enhanced my grasp on the need for
healthcare providers to purpose to make appropriate clinical decisions by considering the need to
make precise diagnoses and the treatment costs related to inappropriate and indiscriminate use of
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lOMoARcPSD|25102205
Clinical Decision-Making 4
these diagnostic tests (Doubravsky and Dohnal, 2015). In view of the complexity of the factors at
play, acute care nurses especially need to consider various strategies and processes to ensure
highest quality of care. Decision making can be complicated by numerous competing factors
such as ethical issues, shortages in qualified workforce, disease state, costs, interprofessional
collaboration and practice restrictions. In Mr. Eli's case for instance, clinical decision was
affected by several factors ranging from patient aggression, working diagnosis of dementia, lack
of collaborative work relationships, limited expertise for assessments and ethical issues such as
patient’s autonomy (Smebye et al., 2015) [Show Less]