Critical Thinking In Nursing Practice

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Critical Thinking in Nursing Practice Critical thinking plays a major part in our everyday decision making whether it is at work as a nurse or in our personal lives. In nursing, critical thinking is a vital skill needed to bring about excellent outcome, stand effective quality care, enhance patient’s safety and satisfaction. It helps nurses know when and how to intervene to situations in a timely and fruitful way “to become a professional nurse requires you learn to think like a nurse” (Critical Thinking and Nursing, 2013). As nurses, we make decisions daily while delivering care to our patients. To do this effectively, nurses should be able to acquire and utilize a higher and advanced level of thinking. According to critical thinking and…show more content…
For example if a patient was running a high temperature, they would administer Tylenol without looking for other causes like dehydration. Sometimes, just asking and encouraging a patient to use an incentive spirometer or get out of bed, ambulate, drink plenty of fluid could do the trick. It has been a long road for me but, I made a conscious decision that if I need to be an effective and skilled nurse, I had to improve on my critical thinking not a task worker. I made it a point to consistently apply the principles of critical thinking by familiarizing myself with the must up to date nursing research and evidence based research data to provide safe, high quality care. Another strategy I used was to approach a situation from more than one point of view, think through problems thoroughly, assess and investigate a problem or situation, implement good use of the nursing process in all situations. An example of thoroughly assessing a problem is, in a situation where you find an oriented head trauma patient with a sudden change in mentation. Before calling the doctor, I would first of all assess orientation, any changes in pupil size; do a set of complete vital signs. Today, I can freely say that my nursing career has evolved tremendously from an occupation to a skilled…show more content…
Like I previously mentioned, I make use of the must up to date nursing research and evidence based data to improve my critical thinking reasoning and skills. In my opinion, nurses demonstrate scholarship into practice when they question certain products, medications, look up actions, adverse effects and drug interactions. When they look up laboratory results and are able to tell which is abnormal and when nurse’s question doctor’s
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