Developing Critical Thinking Skills

Home

August 30, 2010 in Clinical-Issues

For many years, nursing was based on the nursing process that included the principles of assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation and evaluation. This allowed for a more scientific approach to nursing and forced nurses to provide rationes for nursing interventions and to evaluate their effectiveness. However, in today’s nursing, there is a greater focus on the development of critical thinking skills.

Critical thinking encourages nurses to evaluate facts, abstractions, theories, interpretations, deductions and evaluations of arguments made to help us decide what course of action to take or to shape our beliefs. Critical thinking helps us to take part in activity using our knowledge and experience to make creative decisions regarding the care of our patients; it is process driven instead of focusing only on the end product. Using our critical thinking skills, we continually question our actions rather than nursing by rote.

Lunney (2003) discusses seven cognitive skills described by Scheffer and Rubenfeld (2000), who studied 55 nurses who had published literature on critical thinking topics. These seven cognitive skills are identified as:

Analysing- breaking down a situation into its parts in order to determine possible meanings
Applying standards- the nurse selects specific standards that he/she believes fit a particular situation, then considers how these standards can be applied and whether they are applicable to the situation
Discriminating- in discrimination, the nurse considers how a situation is similar to, or different from, other similar situations faced in the past
Information seeking- used to decide whether further information is needed and where further information can be obtained, as well as the practice of obtaining any needed information
Logical reasoning- this step involves clustering data into meaningful groups or patterns and deciding on the relevance of individual pieces of data
Predicting- In this step, the nurse anticipates different outcomes that may arise from using data in different ways and considers diagnoses in relation to interventions
Transforming knowledge- the nurse uses knowledge gained from past experiences and adapts that knowledge to use in new situations

The use of these seven cognitive skills involves critical thinking beyond the simple application of the nursing process. In using these skills, nurses will become more effective problem solvers, advocates and teachers.

Sources:

Lunney, M. (2003). Critical thinking and accuracy of nurse’s diagnoses. International Journal of Nursing Terminologies and Classifications, July to September 2003.

Scheffer, B, & Rubenfeld, M. (2000). A consensus statement on critical thinking. Journal of Nursing Education, 39, 352-359.

Want to make a comment?

How have you developed your critical thinking skills?
What other skills are necessary for a nurse to be able to think critically?

Tags: Nursing Process, Critical Thinking

Comments

Zoe Sep 22, 2010

Experience is the key to developing critical thinking skills. Students are taught the importance of this from the outset. Ways which I, as a student try to do this is seeing my patient as a whole and at the start of each shift making sure I have done a full head-to-toe assessment of each body system. Then once I have my data I try relate this to the patients condition, ie the type of surgery they have just had. Another way in which I try to critically think is to always have a rationale behind any intervention, not just do something for a patient because I know that's what I should do. Always link your care to the patient's specific needs.