ASSESSING DIAGNOSTIC EXPERTISE IN NURSING DOMAIN: THE CUE-BASED APPROACH

This study describe the development of a new, more objective method of distinguishin levels of expertise in neonatal intensive care field, considering the Naturalistic Decision Making approach. This study involved the application of three distinct tasks in which the use of relevant cues could be expected to increase the accuracy of diagnostic performance. These tasks included job stimulation stimuli . A total of 38 experienced neonatal intensive care nurses took part in the study. Using a cluster analysis, it was possible to extract three distinct groups of nurses on the basis of their performance in the cue-based tasks, and these groups corresponded to differences in diagnostic performance. The results indicate assessments of the capacity to extract and utilize cues were able to distinguish expert from but not expert and novice in the context of neonatal intensive care.