Learning about factors influencing clinical decision making

Clinical decision making is both an outcome and a component of clinical reasoning. A contemporary understanding of decision making is that it is bound to the context in which it occurs (Durning et al., 2011).Quality health care occurs when practitioners are able to understand when factors influencing decision making contribute to errors, mistakes and potential adverse outcomes for healthcare participants and recipients and when factors influencing decision making can be manipulated to enhance healthcare experiences or outcomes. Learning to make sound clinical decisions,therefore, requires the ability to learn to identify and understand how contextual factors influence decision making.