Registered Nurses and Licensed/Registered Practical Nurses: A Description and Comparison of Their Decision-Making Process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In many parts of Canada, nursing care is provided by registered nurses (RNs) and licensed/registered practical nurses (L/RPNs). The profession, regulatory bodies and employers are struggling to define their similarities and differences in their attempts to ensure patients are receiving the right care by the right care provider. An understanding of the decision making of nurses presents one way of differentiating between their overlapping roles. Nursing decision-making is a complex cognitive process. Assessment occurs and problems are postulated. Possible alternatives, with their risks and benefits, outcomes and likelihood of outcomes are identified. Preferences and values are considered, and an intervention is selected. The best way to implement an intervention is determined, implementation follows and evaluation takes place. In this research, a triangulated design was used to examine and compare the decision-making process of RNs and L/RPNs. Analysis revealed that nurses consider themselves to be frequently involved in elements that are part of the decision-making process. Nurses attribute the difficulty encountered to the context within which decision making occurs. Differences exist between the RN and L/RPN in the frequency of their involvement with most of the elements of the process. Differences in difficulty encountered with these elements were less pronounced.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".