Discuss The Value Of Critical Thinking And Intuition In Nursing

Critical thinking is a term you will often here in regards to nursing education and the ability to be a successful nurse. Critical thinking is one of the most important skills of a nurse. Nurses must be able to constantly asses and analyze situations in order to prioritize what is the most important task to accomplish next. This is an ever changing situation in health care and especially in the Intensive Care Units.

In addition to these characteristics, nursing also involves critical thinking. "Critical thinking is the active, organized, cognitive process used to carefully examine one's thinking and the thinking of others. It involves the use of the mind in forming conclusions, making decisions, drawing inferences, and reflecting" (Perry,

Critical thinking is a nursing process that includes reflective practice, problem solving and decision making which are connected to one another. The definition of critical thinking is transferring and applying knowledge and skills in a new situation. The critical thinking is needed in a lot of aspects of the nurses’ job such as when the nurses need to provide the precise identification in the specific problems had by the patients. They need to be in detail and also critical to themselves in every time in order to be able to provide identification precisely. When you have the profession in nursing, it is important to be critical thinker. The nurses have the high responsibilities and their responsibilities are increasing from time to time.

After reading the Nurse of he Future Nursing Core Competencies (NOF), I believed it was created to help nurses used critical thinking when delivering care. Being a nurse had empowered me to know the important of critical thinking when caring for patients. “Nurses use critical thinking to integrate objective data with knowledge gained from an assessment of the subjective experiences of patients and groups, and to apply the best available evidence and research data to the processes of diagnosis and treatment”.

Critical Thinking in Clinical Practice There have been several research studies identifying the importance of critical thinking for nurses in clinical practice and the effects on patient care and outcomes. As stated in Assessing Individual Frontline Nurse Critical Thinking," there is widespread agreement among nursing leaders that critical thinking is a frontline nurse competency essential to providing safe and effective care." (Berkow, 2011). Studies continue to identify this in several countries, although the ways to achieve critical thinking varies. The level to which critical thinking should be expected and taught varies in the opinions of researchers.

Underlying both the clinical decision-making process and the nursing process is the skill of critical thinking. Critical thinking has been described as the ability to gather and process data in such a way as to arrive at the best conclusion using the filters of prior knowledge, experience and external resources to overcome personal emotions, biases, and assumptions. (This description was developed during NUR/300 class, University of Phoenix, S. Colorado, March 16, 2006) Note that critical thinking is described as a

The national league for nurses defines critical thinking in the nursing process as “a discipline specific, reflective reasoning process that guides a nurse in generating, implementing, and evaluating approaches for dealing with client care and professional concerns” (Kozier, 2008). This definition is imperative to help a nursing student learn how to think in terms of nursing care. Nursing students must achieve a comprehensive understanding of critical thinking in order to understand the nursing process. The purpose for this paper is for nursing students to learn how to use the nursing process, how to properly document their findings and assessments, and correctly implement APA formatting in a formal paper.

The ability to think critically is vital to a nurse 's role as nurses are faced with constant decision-making in which the answers are often not completely clear or definitive but the consequences of which affect human lives. Critical thinking involves the use of a specific thought process to guide complex clinical decision-making (Arnold & Boggs, 2011). According to Arnold and Boggs (2011), to apply critical thinking, one must: clarify concepts, identify his or her own values, integrate data and identify missing data, obtain new data, identify the significant problem, examine skeptically, apply criteria, generate options and look at alternatives, consider whether factors change if the context changes, make the final decision. Barriers include attitudes, habits, cognitive dissonance, and clashing of personal and professional values. Some important characteristics to a nurse being able to think critically are: the ability to reflect on

Critical thinking is a learned skill vital to making clinical decisions. According to Arnold and Boggs (2016), critical thinking is “the purposeful use of a specific cognitive framework to identify and analyze problems” (p. 45). It is the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking and improve his or her problem solving skills. In the nursing profession, ethical dilemmas often occur, but with critical thinking nurses can resolve their moral distress.

What is critical thinking in nursing? How did the nurses in Lara’s case situation use critical thinking? Give several examples. Critical thinking in nursing is a complex concept where a nurse understands how people think through problems. Critical thinking involves the nurse paying attention to how they’re thinking; this becomes their main concern.

Critical thinking under the limelight when considering accuracy of diagnosis related to nurse’s decision which involves seven cognitive abilities and ten phases of mind. (Lunney & Margaret, 2003). However, when all these factors are established, critical thinking would then setup gaols and derive a plan to identifying, interacting thoughts and interconnecting numerous elements. These all would in return help implantation and evaluation and leading to strong decision making. Moreover, critical thinking is very crucial and important for clinical nursing and its shuffling and implementation further promotes development and decision making criteria (Videbeck, Jan 1997).

Critical thinking is based upon their decision making, problem solving, clinical reasoning and nurses process. During the nursing assessment critical thinking helps the nurse provide evidence of an analysis of the patient’s self-care agency and self-care demand. Also, during the assessment the nurse needs to keep in mind that not everyone responds to pain in the same manner. For example, you have two patients; one with abdominal pain, the other with back pain. The patient with abdominal pain is screaming and crying stating their pain level is a 10, but the patient with back pain is groaning with signs of pain on their face stating they have no pain.

The major study variables in this investigation were critical thinking and clinical judgment skill of nursing students. Critical thinking was operationally defined with the ATI Critical Thinking Test and clinical judgment was operationally defined with the Lasater’s Clinical Judgment Rubric (Mann, 2012). The independent variable was identified as the Level II baccalaureate nursing students. The dependent variable was identified as the critical thinking and clinical judgment skills of the nursing students. The demographic variables included the gender and age of the

It is always a challenge to cultivate critical thinking in any profession. It is, nevertheless, a vital component of creating a dynamic and effective workplace. This is particularly important in terms of nursing practice, since many situations in the hospital are dynamic and fluid, requiring critical thinking to ensure the optimal outcome for both nursing practice in general and the situation for patients in particular.

Critical thinking and clinical reasoning are similar in the fact that each term represents a set of methods that guide the nurse to reliable evidence-based practice while delivering care. Critical thinking and clinical reasoning are centered on knowledge base that is associated with the discipline of nursing. With each concept, the nurse must have an existing developed knowledge base in which to apply each concept to. Nurses apply critical thinking and clinical reasoning skills when patient care decisions are made. With both critical thinking and clinical reasoning, information about the patient is collected and examined. They work together to produce clinical judgment. They both direct nursing care to meet patients’ needs resulting in higher quality of care and better patient outcomes.