Embracing Nursing Mindset: A Crucial Skill

Thinking as a Nurse

Why should I think as a nurse? How can I think as a nurse? What area of professionalism is important? The real question is why are these topics important. Being able to think as a nurse is critical for anyone who wants to have a career in nursing. If you can’t think as a nurse you will be unable to provide appropriate care for you patients, not have the right mindset, and could both physically and mentally cause harm to your patients.

Why is it important for me right now as a student to be able to think as a nurse? I believe that the number one reason is that nurses need as much practice as they can get to be able to properly think as a nurse. Pretty soon we will graduate and be nurses in the real world. If we wait until that point to try to start thinking as a nurse, we will already be

Although using our intuition as nurses can be very beneficial, we can’t just go off of intuition. We need to investigate that patient, symptom, or problem and justify our intuition with evidence so that we can then solve the issue. In the book “Thinking as a Nurse” by Bruce Scott, I really enjoyed the story pertaining to nurses intuition in chapter 7. The nurse was caring for a patient, when the patient’s daughter and son-in-law come in to be with her. She finished up what she was doing and left, then immediately went back into the room. She went back into the room because she felt that there was something wrong with the son-in-law. He felt strange, his lips and tongue were becoming swollen and he was breathing rapidly. Come to find out he had an allergic reaction to shellfish and shrimp that he had eaten earlier that evening. In this instance the nurse had never met this man, he was not her patient, yet she felt that something was wrong and investigated (Scott,