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Critical Thinking and Nursing Judgment. NPN 105 Joyce Smith RN, BSN. What is Critical Thinking?. It is something you do every day It is a life skill you learned as you developed into adulthood It is not a difficult task It is the way you make decisions in your daily life
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Critical Thinking and Nursing Judgment NPN 105 Joyce Smith RN, BSN
What is Critical Thinking? • It is something you do every day • It is a life skill you learned as you developed into adulthood • It is not a difficult task • It is the way you make decisions in your daily life • It can also be called deductive reasoning • It is a system which allows nurses to make choices which are best for the patients
Clinical Decisions in Nursing Practice • Clinical decision-making skills separate professional nurses from technical and ancillary staff. • Patients have problems for which there are no textbook solutions. • You need to seek knowledge, act quickly, and make sound clinical decisions.
Critical Thinking Defined • Profetto-McGrath and others (2003) • Critical thinking is both a process and set of skills. • Chaffee (2002) • Active, organized, cognitive process used to examine one’s thinking and that of others • Settersten and Lauver (2004) • Recognize, analyze, evaluate, and draw conclusions
Critical Thinking Skills • Interpretation • Analysis • Inference • Evaluation • Explanation • Self-regulation
Attributes of a Critical Thinker • Seek the truth, nothing but the truth • Accept others ideas and beliefs • Watch for problems and plan for them ahead of time • Be organized and work toward good results • Trust in your own abilities • Look for opportunities for learning • Realize that there may be other ways besides yours
Aspects of Critical Thinking • Reflection • Review what you did and ways to improve • Did you follow the standards? • Language • Always communicate clearly to the patient and staff • Intuition • Develop a “gut feeling” based on your experience and knowledge • Realize what you do not know and then find out
Thinking and Learning • Levels of thinking in nursing • Basic critical thinking • Complex critical thinking • Commitment
Critical Thinking Competencies • Scientific method • Problem solving • Decision making • Diagnostic reasoning • Clinical decision making • Nursing process
A Critical Thinking Model • Models serve to explain concepts and help you make decisions and judgments about your patients. • Kataoka-Yahiro and Saylor (1994) • Define the outcome of critical thinking as nursing judgment that is relevant to nursing problems in a variety of settings
Components of Critical Thinking • Five components of critical thinking • Knowledge base • Experience • Competence • Attitudes • Standards
Nursing Process Overview • Use of the nursing process enables the nurse to: • Assess a patient’s health care needs • Determine nursing diagnosis • Plan care • Implement nursing interventions • Evaluate the effectiveness of care