Teaching clinical judgment in Taiwan

Clinical judgment is a process that nurses use during the course of their daily practice to gather and to evaluate data, define the needs of the clients, and to judge the outcome of patient care. Such judgment is also a critical ability used to assess the progress of nursing students. The purpose of this qualitative research was to describe the clinical judgment teaching in nursing education in Taiwan and provide baseline data for future nursing students to learn in a more effective way. Data was collected by in-depth individual interviews of 10 participants, all of whom were senior nursing faculty members from different nursing subspecialties. Two findings were reached. First, clinical judgment included not only the cognitive and the psychomotor domain of learning, but also the affective domain of reasoning. Second, due to cultural differences, " intuition " had never been mentioned in Taiwan, but a similar concept was substituted by use of the term " experience ". The findings suggested a holistic and integrative perspective was needed when teaching clinical judgement in Taiwan.