Nurses' decision-making in collecting information for the assessment of patients' nursing problems.

1. The paper addresses two questions: Firstly, what kind of information do nurses acquire from cancer patients for purposes of judging their patients' problems and preparing a care plan? Secondly, how systematically do nurses proceed in the decision-making process from the formulation of initial assumptions about the patient's situation to the final definition of problems? 2. The instrument used for data collection was a computer-simulated case description compiled by a team of four nursing researchers and one medical researcher.