What Can Intuition Teach a Chief Care Officer

A Chief Care Officer makes decisions with incomplete information all the time.

The care plan may say one thing while the person in front of you tells a different story. An aide may report that everything went well during a shift, but I may notice that my mother-in-law, Mary, seems unsettled, more tired, or simply not quite herself. I may not know what is wrong, but something makes me stop and look again.

That something may be intuition.

I don’t mean intuition as a diagnosis or a substitute for professional expertise. I mean the internal signal that makes us notice something before we can fully explain why we noticed it. In caregiving, that signal can be useful because you spend so much time learning what is normal for the person in your care.

Sometimes You Notice Before There Is Evidence

I have experienced this with Mary more times than I can count.

There were occasions when I was convinced she had pneumonia before there was physical evidence that anyone could point to. Nothing necessarily announced itself in a way that would have allowed me to say, “This is pneumonia.” Instead, I knew something about her was different. Her energy, her behavior, the way she was responding, or simply the way she seemed to me did not fit her baseline.

That distinction matters.

I wasn’t diagnosing her. I was noticing a change in someone I knew extremely well.  Once I noticed it, my responsibility was to investigate. I could check what had changed, talk with her doctors, watch for additional symptoms, review what was happening with her care, and keep paying attention. Eventually, there might be evidence that explained what I had been seeing.

My intuition got me to the question. It did not give me the answer.  That has become one of the most important distinctions in my own caregiving.

Intuition Can Tell You Where to Look

Caregiving generates an enormous amount of information. Some of it comes from doctors and nurses. Some comes from medication lists, hospital discharge instructions, care notes, and conversations with aides. A great deal comes from observation.

You learn how the person you care for normally moves, speaks, eats, sleeps, responds to people, and handles familiar routines. When something changes, you may notice the difference before you can put it into words.

That doesn’t mean your intuition has identified the cause. It means you have information worth examining.

Perhaps the next step involves checking the medication record. Maybe you call the doctor’s office, review what happened during the previous shift, or compare today’s behavior with what you documented yesterday. Sometimes you discover a straightforward explanation. Other times, you uncover a question that needs professional attention.

Intuition can get you to the question. Evidence still needs to help you find the answer.

What Mediumship Development Can Teach Us

This is one reason I think mediumship development can have an unexpected application for someone serving as a Chief Care Officer.

At its best, mediumship development involves learning to notice what you experience without immediately turning an impression into a conclusion. You learn to distinguish an impression from your interpretation of that impression. You learn to stay curious when something doesn’t make sense and to recognize that your first interpretation may not be the correct one.

Those skills have value outside a mediumship reading.

A Chief Care Officer might notice tension when an aide describes a situation. Instead of deciding the aide has done something wrong, that observation can prompt a closer look. A family conversation may leave you uneasy, but the feeling itself doesn’t tell you why you feel uneasy. You can investigate rather than filling the gap with an assumption.

That difference matters because caregiving already gives us plenty of reasons to jump to conclusions.

Intuition Is Information, Not Expertise

I’ve written before that intuition does not make someone a doctor, lawyer, social worker, pharmacist, or any other professional. The same principle applies here.

Your intuition may tell you that something deserves another look. It cannot tell you that Mary has an infection, that a medication causes a particular symptom, or that a particular treatment will work. Those questions require appropriate professional evaluation.

A Chief Care Officer does not have to choose between intuition and evidence. The two simply have different jobs.

Notice. Question. Investigate. Verify. Act.

Intuition may enter at the beginning of that process. It can help you notice the thing that doesn’t quite fit and give you a reason to ask another question. Evidence, professional expertise, and direct observation then have to do their part.

That approach also protects us from another danger: treating every feeling as a warning.

Sometimes something feels wrong because something is wrong. Sometimes we are tired, frightened, frustrated, or carrying yesterday’s experience into today’s situation. Discernment requires us to consider both possibilities.

Developing the Skill of Noticing

Chief Care Officers develop a form of expertise that rarely appears on a résumé. They become students of the person they care for and of the systems surrounding that person.

Developing intuition can sharpen the noticing part of that work. Mediumship development may offer another way to practice observing impressions, separating observation from interpretation, and remaining curious about information that doesn’t immediately make sense.

None of this requires giving intuition the final word.  In fact, I think the opposite approach makes intuition more useful. Your intuition may tell you where to look. It does not get to tell you what you found.

That distinction allows a Chief Care Officer to trust their observations without pretending they have all the answers. In caregiving, that can make the difference between reacting to a feeling and asking the question that needed to be asked.