Ambiguity Within Nursing Practice: An Evolutionary Concept Analysis.

Purpose: To analyze the concept of ambiguity in a nursing context.

Background: Ambiguity is inherent within nursing practice. As health care becomes increasingly complex, nurses must continue to successfully deal with greater amounts of clinical ambiguity.

Facilitating the Transition of Nurse Clinician to Nurse Scientist: Significance of Entry PhD Courses.

Transitioning into the role of nurse scientist requires the acquisition of new knowledge but also involves the development of new scholarly skills and the appropriation of the unique values and goals of the new role. Students engaged in doctor of philosophy education in all practice disciplines are confronted with a necessary shift in perspective and identity from that of the practice expert to the research scientist and experience a tension referred to as the research-practice dualism. The purpose of this article is to examine the ramifications of this identity shift in nursing doctor of philosophy education and to detail one program's strategy to address the inherent tension.

Embedded, engaged, evolving: a consortium of nurse researchers and clinicians.

This article describes the journey of an innovative partnership among nurse researchers and nurse clinicians. The Chronic Illness Consortium (CIC) is an academic-service partnership between a university and its neighbors in a region without an academic medical center. It began with a small group of nurse researchers seeking a strategy to maximize research output and knowledge development and has evolved over 6 years into a forum that bridges scholars and clinicians, specialists and generalists, current and former students.

Coupling the N-CODES system with actual nurse decision-making.

Nurses must be involved in the development and testing of clinical decision support systems if systems that fit into the actual clinical decision-making process and the flow of practice are to be designed. This article discusses the first trial of N-CODES, the Nurse Decision Support System. This system is designed to assist nurses, particularly novices, to make clinical decisions.

Modelling novice clinical reasoning for a computerized decision support system.

Aim: The aim of this paper is to introduce the theoretical framework that directs the project.

Background: The Novice Computer Decision Support (N-CODES) Project is developing a point-of-care system to assist novice acute care nurses while making clinical judgements. Unlike prior approaches, N-CODES is guided by a theoretical understanding of nurses' decision-making processes, including the manner by which novices develop this skill.

The N-CODES project: the first year.

Clinical decision making is a complex task, and particularly challenging for the novice nurse. Little assistance is available, and decision supports such as standardized guidelines are difficult to access in the hectic flow of practice. The Nursing Computer Decision Support (N-CODES) project, directed by investigators for nursing and computer engineering, addresses this problem by developing a prototype of a point-of-care system to deliver clinical knowledge via a handheld computer.

Knowledge acquisition, synthesis, and validation: a model for decision support systems.

Background: Decision tools such as clinical decision support systems must be built on a solid foundation of nursing knowledge. However, current methods to determine the best evidence do not include a broad range of knowledge sources. As clinical decision support systems will be designed to assist nurses when making critical decisions, methods need to be devised to glean the best possible knowledge.