THE CHALLENGES OF NEWLY GRADUATED NURSES FOR GAINING COMPETENCE IN CLINICAL JUDGMENT: A QUALITATIVE STUDY

Clinical judgment is a complex phenomenon which can cause challenges for newly graduated nurses in the decision making process. The aim of this study was to describe the experiences of newly graduated nurses’ challenges on the road to gain competence in clinical judgment.

This qualitative study was conducted using the purposive sampling method and was based on the data saturation principle. Data were collected from 30 newly graduated nurses who were working in teaching hospitals in four northwest provinces of Iran during the two past years. Data was collected by means of in-depth semi-structured interviews. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyze the data.

The main challenges for the newly graduated nurses to gain competence in clinical judgment were four categories including: ineffective assessments, weakly interacting, skill related problems and unreliable decisions, and also eight sub-categories including unstructured observations, perfunctory exploration, communication problems, misapprehension, unfamiliarity with the skills, lack of conversance, decision making errors and conflict in the selection.

Achieving to the clinical judgment skills is a professional competence for newly graduated nurses. The familiarity with these challenges can help educational and executive managers to plan new programs for mitigating these challenges and to prevent undesirable consequences.