Responding to uncertainty in nursing practice

Uncertainty is a fact of life for practising clinicians and cannot be avoided. This paper outlines the model of uncertainty presented by Katz (1988, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. pp. 544–565) and examines the descriptive and normative power of three broad theoretical and strategic approaches to dealing with uncertainty: rationality, bounded rationality and intuition. It concludes that nursing research and development (R&D) must acknowledge uncertainty more fully in its R&D agenda and that good-quality evaluation studies which directly compare intuitive with rational–analytical approaches for given clinical problems should be a dominant feature of future R&D.