Conclusion
Preference for intuition in nursing was characterised by two aspects: Skilled Innovator and Physical/Spiritual Intuition. These two kinds of intuition were distinct from general preference for intuition outside of nursing. Preference for intuition in nursing increased with experience in the domain, though additional research is needed to determine whether this increase is due to expertise.
Relevance to clinical practice
Given that more experienced nurses reported using intuition more often than those with little experience, a logical question is whether or not this strategy leads to more accurate clinical judgements. Are more intuitive nurses also more accurate in predicting patient outcomes? If this is the case, additional hypotheses may be made about the type of nursing intuition that would be most predictive of success in clinical situations. Is sensitivity to Physical or Spiritual cues key to understanding a patient’s prognosis, or is the validity of judgements more strongly influenced by a nurse’s self-perception as a skilled clinician who employs intuition to innovate clinical practice? If intuition is associated with better clinical judgement, should novice nurses be encouraged to trust their intuitions, no matter how little experience they have?
Additional work is needed to explore which aspects of experience lead nurses to report using intuition more frequently. As Benner et al. (2009) confirm, ‘intuition constitutes a significant part of the everyday practice of expert nurses’ (p. 210). Various factors may be at play, including the nature of the work, the vast body of evidence accumulated throughout a career and self-confidence that comes with experience in the field. If experience simply leads to increased self-confidence in intuition, this may not actually be related to improved accuracy in judgement. In contrast, if experience provides valuable information on associations between patient symptoms and outcomes, then intuition may be enhanced.
It is important to keep in mind that experience is not equivalent to expertise (Ericsson et al. 2007). In this study, data on years of experience were obtained, but no information on the level of competence of the nurses was available. Future work should attempt to examine intuitiveness at varying levels of expertise, as estimated with performance-based measures.