Decision-making

Last updated: Monday, September 26, 2022

An important part of being a professional is making decisions. You will often rely on facts to make decisions: information that you’ve learned, data from a patient’s notes, evidence that you find in a book or online.

But the decisions you make professionally will not always rely solely on facts, or you may not always have all the facts that you need. And in these situations you may feel less certain about what to do. You might, for example, need to make a decision in circumstances where:

• The medicine or the clinical situation is unfamiliar to you.
• You don’t have enough information or the information you have is conflicting.
• There is pressure on you to make a quick decision.
• You or a colleague has made a mistake.
• There is no ideal solution, but a decision still needs to be made.
• A colleague or patient is upset, angry, or threatening to complain.

It is difficult to teach you how to handle these ‘less straightforward’ situations. Many of them might be said to require professional judgement. This is something that we tend to learn by experience. However, in this section of the Learning Portal we will provide some scenarios to help you think about these kinds of situation in advance, and also introduce some principles to guide you.

Click here to start or you can look at an individual section via the links below:

• Multiple priorities


• Lack of information


• Out of my depth


• Making a mistake


• Conflicting information


• Ethical dilemmas


• Next steps in learning...

You can download a PDF of the text of this tutorial.