What Is Critical Thinking In Nursing

This chapter define critical thinking and explain the importance of critical thinking in nursing. It is important for the RN to make decisions based on what she has learned, her experience, and skill. Critical thinking is a skills that must be learn throughout our nursing career. Also the chapter discuss about many features of critical thinking which include the practical features of critical thinking. According to the chapter, critical thinking can be defined as “a purposeful, goal directed process of inquiry that utilizes available facts, principles, theories, and abstractions to analyze, make inferences, solve problems, or arrive at decisions.” Also to think critically we have to think RED which means Recognize symptoms, Evaluate arguments,

and Draw conclusions. Critical thinking is the skill the RN have to understand and put it into practice. In clinical judgment, the nurse decisions are based on changing observations and collecting data. The standard of care indicates that nurses should assess, analyze, plan, implement, and evaluate the plan of care for individual patient. A lot of thinking skills supports the critical thinking process, which are cultivated thinking, and deductive and inductive reasoning. The RN will use the nursing process to collect her assessments and gather relevant data which will identify the actual and possible problem. Taking general assessment data by the nurse, drawing conclusions from the data, to identified problems at hand, and preparing a care of plan are the deductive reasoning process. On the other hand, the nurse uses inductive reasoning when the patient came with problems that the nurse has seen already. Due to the assessment data collected, the RN then makes conclusion, asked additional questions and come up with decisions. Acquiring experience in this area will enable the nurse to become better in the use of cues from the patient and the environment to make accurate decisions. In order for the RN to be successful in both personal and professional life, we must practice the process of critical thinking.