Critical care nurses' information-seeking behaviour during an unfamiliar patient care task

Critical care nurses complete tasks during patient care to promote the recovery or maintain the health of their patients. These tasks can be routine or non-routine to the nurse. Non-routine tasks are characterized by unfamiliarity, requiring nurses to seek additional information from a variety of sources to effectively complete the tasks. Critical care units are dynamic environments where decisions are often made by nurses under stress and time pressure because patient status changes rapidly. A non-routine task (e.g., administration of an unfamiliar medication) to the critical care nurse can impact patient care outcomes (e.g., increased time to complete task has consequences for the patient). In this article, the authors discuss literature reviewed on nurses' information-seeking and explore an information-seeking conceptual model that will be used as a guide to examine the main concepts found through the empirical evidence.