| Nurses routinely make complex clinical decisions under conditions of uncertainty. They collect large amounts of unmanageable data in the process of making clinical decisions. To assist nurses in collecting and organizing data and making complex clinical decisions, some nursing scholars recommend decision support systems. A decision tree is a support system that leads the nurse from general to specific assessments and ultimately a decision choice or outcome. A decision tree was examined, in this study, for its utility in promoting accuracy in decision making for chronic wound management among home care nurses. It was found that home care nurses who used the decision tree made better decisions about staging and product choices for chronic wounds. More research is necessary to discover if chronic wound management decision trees translate into improved patient outcomes. |
