An examination of nurses’ practical judgments about the cognitive function of hospitalized older people
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nurses’ understandings of older patients’ cognitive function are central to how they determine and enact nursing care of older people in hospital, however, it remains unclear how nurses develop these understandings. The nursing literature concerned with how nurses determine actions in practice has begun to shift from instrumental views of reasoning to recognition that judgments are based on complex knowledge and are embedded in the particular context of nurses’ work. This study aimed to make explicit the complex, situated practical judgments of nurses about the cognitive function of older people in hospitals. The conceptual foundation of the study was informed by an integration of Aristotle’s notion of phronesis and Foucault’s understanding of power. A focused ethnographic study was conducted on two units in an urban general hospital over one year. Data were collected from 21 nurse informants through observations and interviews, and an analysis of documents used in their practice. Data analysis was guided by an analytic framework reflective of the conceptual framework. The findings showed that practical judgments about the cognitive function of older patients in hospital were structured through social relations, and nurses worked within that structure toward a complex understanding of patients’ cognitive function that would enable them to improve the situation of patients. Furthermore, ensuring safety and physiological stability emerged as the goals of nursing care related to the cognitive function of older patients and provided direction for practical judgments, including what evidence was sought and how it was used in deliberations about action. This articulation of nurses’ practical judgments about the cognitive function of older patients in hospital is a foundation for further inquiry into the context of nursing practice, educating new nurses on the complexity of nursing judgments and examining policy related to the structures guiding acute care nursing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".