The Application of Clinical Judgment and Decision Making of Critical Care Nurses in Intensive Care Units (ICUs)

Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is the hospital setting in which applied the specific practice of clinical decisionmaking and judgment. The study aimed to explain how to apply clinical decision-making in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Four databases CINAHL, MEDLINE, PUBMED and DISCOVERED were used to extract Twenty-two relevant articles. Suitable articles were systematically reviewed and analyzed. The results described eight themes of clinical judgment including; 1) application of Tanner's clinical judgment model in ICU, 2) Types of decisions in ICU, 3) Theoretical approach: implementation of decision-making in ICU, 4) Case illustration of decision-making scheme in ICU, 5) Influencing factors of decision-making in ICU, 6) Supporting tools for clinical decision-making in ICU, 7) Understanding of attributes and concepts may enhance the quality of the clinical decision-making process in ICU, 8) Implications for nursing education and practice regarding the clinical decision making in ICU. Critical care nurses usually combine different techniques in making decisions; analytical methods including the hypothetic-deductive method, pattern recognition, intuition, narrative thinking, and decision analysis theory are potentially applied.