Cognitive Shortcutting Methods

Decision making is a fundamental part of being a health professional. It involves a complex thought process, from forming a conception and establishing cues to then deciding from a variety of hypotheses and making the decision (Sanders et al, 2007, p.291). As a paramedic working under the common pressures and time restraints in emergency situations, many decisions may have to be based on intuition (Standing, 2011, p.8). It is in these situations when a person may use different types of cognitive shortcuts known as heuristics in order to make decisions quickly based on their previous personal experiences. This essay will look as these important shortcutting methods used in paramedicine as well as the possible errors and biases that may arise …show more content…
They conducted a study comparing novice nurses to more experienced nurses and they found that the clinical decisions processes between the two groups were often very different. One of the main significant differences was the time required to reach the final decision. A more experienced nurse uses different information collection strategies and is able to recall on previous, similar situations which help identify important and relevant information. Less experienced nurses want to use all the information and consider it all to be of equal relevance since they have fewer situations to relate to (Corcoran, 1986). This is believed to be due to heuristics, the cognitive shortcutting in which decisions are reached much more quickly by processing a lot of information efficiently (Thompson and Dowding, 2002, p.15), an important skill to have as a paramedic.
In 1972, Newell and Simon brought the term ‘heuristics’ to the wide attention of psychologists and used it to describe how individuals were able to use simple mental processes to replace more complex algorithms (Shah and Oppenheimer, 2008). The three more important heuristics used by healthcare professionals are the Representativeness, Availability and Anchoring & Adjustment heuristics (Cioffi, …show more content…
To demonstrate this Schraeder and Fischer (1987, p.48–49) used the example of a nurse describing the skin colour of newly born babies. “Every baby has a colour of his own… hopefully every baby is pink, or little bit yellow if they are a couple of years old”. This nurse has used a cognitive reference point that babies are born pink as an anchor and then adjusts it to explain the change in colour to a slight yellow over time. Cioffi (1997, p.207) describes the importance of this heuristic as it allows healthcare professionals to make accurate representations despite having only limited information and knowledge of a group of associated quantities. More senior professionals often have the advantage of experience over novice professionals and therefore have an intuitive knowledge that allows them to eliminate many steps of the thought process, hence arriving at an accurate judgement much

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