Background: Observation is an important skill for making appropriate nursing decisions and engaging\nin good practice. However, experts� observation behavior and cognitive processes cannot\nbe easily verbalized or documented in an objective and accurate manner. Quantitative analysis of\nthe observation behavior of nurses with rich clinical experience will yield effective educational\ndata for fostering and improving nursing students� observation skills. Objectives: To improve\nnursing assessment education, the differences in the information gathering processes between\nclinical nurses and nursing students were analyzed by using a portable eye-tracker. Design: An\nexperimental study. Settings: The experiment was performed at a university in Japan. Participants:\nThe participants were 11 clinical nurses with at least 5 years of clinical experience for postoperative\npatients, and 10 fourth-year nursing students. Methods: In a mock hospital room, wherein we\nrecreated a situation where a patient in postoperative day 1 was confined to a bed, participants\nwore an eye-tracking camera and engaged in nursing observation to make an early postoperative\nambulation assessment of the patient. Participants� gaze points and gaze fixation durations were\nextracted from the gaze measurement data and compared. Results: Clinical nurses had shorter\nobservation times and gaze durations than did nursing students, and focused more on the patient\nchart, intravenous drip, and indwelling drain. Students gazed for longest at the measuring devices\nfor vital signs. Conclusions: We quantitatively analyzed differences in nursing observation according\nto clinical experience. Although no significant difference was found in gaze points, nursing\nstudents had a greater tendency to focus on information that was numerically displayed. Nurses\nwith clinical experience conducted observations by gazing at information that they needed to focus\non the most according to the patients� postoperative course.
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