Recognizing the Existence of Cues

Nurses mentally recognize cues early in the diagnostic process and continue to integrate cue recognition throughout the process. Cues are until of data, (e.g., a person’s rate of breathing), which a nurse collects during intentional or unintentional assessment. Intentional assessment involves deliberate collection of data as a foundation for nursing actions. Unintentional assessment involves noticing cues that are important without planning to do so. In clinical situations, nurses notice cues to diagnoses by thinking about what they see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. Information pertaining to the health care consumer is thought about in relation to the nurse’s knowledge of the health state or life situation of the consumer. Nurses attend to information based on established ideas of what should occur in various situations. A nurse may not notice a person’s rate of breathing, for example, unless it looks unusual in the context of a health problem (e.g., the individual is one day post-abdominal surgery), or other aspects of the clinical situation (e.g., the individual has just completed vigorous exercise). A nurse’s recognition of a unit of data as a cue with special meaning is dependent on knowledge stored in memory. Knowledge bases in memory are used for comparison of current data with expected data.