Week 9-Nursing Critical Thinking, assessment, diagnosis and planning

Developing Critical Thinking Skills in Nursing

• Critical thinking is a process and set of skills involving issue recognition, information analysis, evaluation, and evidence-informed decision-making.
• Critical thinking skills include interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation, and self-regulation.
• The College of Nurses of Ontario (CNO) outlines cognitive requirements, such as problem-solving and concentration skills, as well as the ability to develop professional judgment through critical thinking.
• Critical thinking goes beyond cognitive skills and also involves asking questions, being well-informed, honest, and willing to reconsider and think clearly about issues.
• Critical thinking dispositions include truth-seeking, open-mindedness, analyticity, systematicity, self-confidence, inquisitiveness, and maturity.
• The critical thinking model for clinical decision making devised by Kataoka-Yahiro and Saylor includes basic critical thinking, complex critical thinking, and commitment.
• Levels of critical thinking are acquired through learning and experience, progressing from basic to complex critical thinking and finally to commitment.
• Developing critical thinking skills in nursing can be achieved through case-based learning, reflective writing, concept mapping, and fostering a culture of questioning.
• Critical thinking is a reasoning process that integrates knowledge, reflection, and professional practice standards to provide competent, ethical nursing care.
• Self-reflection is essential for nurses to assess their critical thinking skills and growth over time, including comparing themselves to others and identifying instances where they impressed themselves with their critical thinking abilities.
• Critical thinking in nursing requires a desire for intellectual growth and the use of the nursing process to make care decisions.
• The ability to think critically is a crucial skill for nurses, involving a wide range of cognitive and dispositional attributes to provide competent and ethical care.

Importance of Critical Thinking in Nursing

• Critical thinking in nursing involves thorough patient assessments to detect any issues, utilizing detective skills and intuition to guide patient assessments.
• Nurses must manage situations by recognizing and investigating changes in a patient's condition, implementing appropriate nursing interventions, and potentially calling the doctor.
• Effective patient interactions require nurses to use communication skills to discern patients' needs and ask the right questions to collect and make sense of information.
• Prioritizing is crucial in nursing as nurses must strategize, plan, and organize information to manage their workload and adjust to unplanned events.
• Critical thinking skills significantly increase the quality of patient care and are essential for ensuring patient safety.
• Nurses must be able to recognize changes in a patient's condition, conduct independent interventions, anticipate patients' and providers' needs, and prioritize accordingly.
• The nursing process involves assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation, and evaluation, with assessment being an ongoing critical thinking process.
• Assessment in nursing includes collecting, organizing, validating, and documenting data to establish an individualized database of a client's health status and coping patterns.
• Data in nursing assessment can be subjective (e.g., patient's reported pain) or objective (e.g., vital signs), and can be collected from the client, family, significant others, healthcare team, and medical records.
• Nursing diagnosis is a clinical judgment about a client's response to an actual or potential health problem, different from a medical diagnosis which identifies a disease condition.
• NANDA International provides a common nomenclature for translating nursing observations and assessments into standard conclusions to aid in the formulation of nursing diagnoses.
• Nursing diagnoses focus on a client's actual or potential response to a health problem, rather than the physiological event, complication, or disease, and help in prioritizing and planning patient care.