Proposal of a digital tool to develop clinical reasoning of novice nurses in psychiatry: An exploratory study in France

In France, successive reforms in nursing education have resulted in a 90 % reduction in hours of theoretical instruction in clinical psychopathology since 1972. As a result, novice nurses in psychiatry feel that they have not received sufficient theoretical training at the beginning of their careers. This particularly affects their ability to search for reliable data in order to guide and orient their clinical judgment. The objective of this exploratory study is to determine if a digital tool could serve as a lever to help these novice nurses in psychiatry to improve the various phases within clinical judgment. Similar digital tools have shown promising results in other medical fields but, to our knowledge, there are no reports of such a system for nursing psychiatry in the literature. A cross-sectional quotation qualitative study was carried out by interviewing seventeen novice nurses in psychiatry with different profiles. The interview guide, based on Benner's theory and Tanner and Rabardel's models, addresses several topics: professional background and motivation, evaluation of initial training, problems identified in practice, sources of information in the field of psychiatry, and finally acceptance of digital tools. The analysis of these interviews confirms the feeling of lack of knowledge among these professionals and indicates that a digital tool would be well accepted. Several examples were identified for the content of this tool, including ways to use it during the clinical judgment process.