Module 4

1. How did the readings influence your perception of your own clinical decision-making? How do we reconcile the value of nursing experience with known heuristics and biases used in human decision making?
The use of heuristics is innate and with this comes innate misperceptions involving judgment and probability. Personally, I do incorporate previous experience of probabilities when making judgments about situations. Understanding the existence of such biases is important if one is to offset their potential erroneous influence as it relates to making clinical decisions. When considering insensitivity to sample size, despite a perceived decent understanding of statistics, I too rationalized what the majority assumed, however after reading on remembered that larger sample sizes are less likely to experience significant deviations from a known average. From this it is apparent that I need to consciously evaluate each individual situation and possibly even conduct some basic research prior to making a decision which could help to reduce the occurrence of such biases. To me, after rationalizing each of the individual topics specific to known heuristics and biases, the correct assumption is always understandable which I attribute to my experience and education, however despite this background, it is easy to see how such mistakes can be made. It is clear why using Evidence Based Practice is so important as its use can obviously reduce the occurrence of making judgment errors if one is closely adhering to the highly supported practices it promotes.