Critical Thinking in Nursing Practice
Critical thinking is one of the most essential aspects in the delivery of nursing services. Nurses are required to employ critical thinking in their work place. Critical thinking is described as the means of identifying the problem, determining the most appropriate solution and choosing the means effective method of achieving the desired solution (Fesler-Birch, 2005). Typically, individuals who employ critical thinking often take time to evaluate if the interventions that were employed were the most effective and if there were any measures that could have been taken to improve the level of the outcomes. Critical thinking is therefore an element that is highly required by the nurses. In order to achieve nurse sensitive outcomes, there is the need to undertake appropriate assessment, make the necessary nursing diagnosis, put in place intervening measures and make the desired evaluation to determine whether the necessary goals were met. These steps needs efficient decision making.
Secondly, Critical thinking is also significantly affect nurse sensitive outcomes since it affects quality of nursing care and the accountability. The quality of nursing services rendered has implications to the achievement of the necessary goals (Fesler-Birch, 2005). Critical thinking there comes in handy since it assists nurses to have the confidence, creativity, contextual perspective, flexibility, intellectual integrity and open mindedness. Additionally, creative thinking also assists in achieving intuition, perseverance and reflection of nursing services. These characteristics are highly needed in the achievement of nurse sensitive outcomes. Most often, nurse sensitive outcomes require that the nurse carefully employs these characteristics in determining the primary, secondary and the priority needs of the patients so as to promote patient comfort. Therefore, critical thinking is an important asset in the nursing practise.
Reference
Fesler-Birch, D. M. (2005). Critical thinking and patient outcomes: A review. Nursing Outlook, 53(2), 59-65. doi:10.1016/j.outlook.2004.11.005
