ABSTRACT
There has been a significant change in the role of critical care nurses over the last 10 years to incorporate skills once perceived as being within the remit of the medical profession (Cox and McGrath, 1999). Nurses are now performing more complex assessment to complement technological interventions carried out within critical care units (Field, 1997a). With this comes the requirement to relate normal and abnormal physiology to the observations that are being documented, in order to prioritise patient care. Critical care nurses in the USA, Canada and Australia perform more detailed physical assessment as part of their comprehensive role for patients (Rushforth et al., 1998), and recently education providers in the UK have begun incorporating physical assessment skills into courses for postregistration nurses.
