Over time, as experience develops, clinical reasoning themes emerge that speed our decision-making for commonly reoccurring scenarios. We begin, for example, to develop rules of thumb and analogies resulting in common pattern recognition that originate from past successes. The formal term for this is heuristics. In fact, clinicians rarely use formal computations to make patient care decisions in day-to-day practice….
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Although every nursing specialty has its challenges, correctional nursing involves complex situations that can appear simple, but aren’t. There are many unknown factors in sizing up a situation. Correctional nurses are most often the first healthcare staff to review the patient complaint/situation. Thus, during patient triage, the nurse must make a fairly autonomous judgment on what needs to be done…
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