Critical Thinking In Nursing

Laura Pueyo, Haematology Nurse, discusses why Critical Thinking is important in Nursing and gives examples of how, when put into practice, it can improve your Nursing and reduce potential mistakes.

What is Critical Thinking?

Hey guys, my name is Laura.

I'm one of the Nurses from the NHS.

And today I would like to talk about critical thinking in Nursing.

I think the best way to explain this topic is with some examples.

So, let's just start picturing this.

Imagine you just started on your ward a couple of months ago and today your congestive heart failure patient is scheduled for a pacemaker implantation first thing in the morning.

So the doctor orders two units of bloods before transferring the patient to the theatre.

So you start with the first bag with no problem but at the beginning of the second bag, your patient's oxygen saturation drops from 95 to 91.

So you start to administer some oxygen but this only brings your patient's oxygen level up to 91.

So you stop and think, what could be wrong with your patient?

You'd take all of the notes and you take the charts and you notice the input and output.

So your patient has a positive fluid balance of two litres.

And you remember hearing some crackles when breathing.

So now what do you do?

It takes critical thinking to determine what could be going on with your patient and what you should do about it.

Using Critical Thinking And Why It’s Important?

Okay, now that we have identified critical thinking, let's see what it is exactly and why it is useful for Nurses.

Critical thinking is a specific way of using your mind. It's your ability to objectively judge information rather than believing everything you are told.

It's basically to question the information that has been given to you.

Like why this patient oxygen saturation is dropping.

Not just automatically accept what you are told but instead you use your brain to analyse something before deciding whether to agree with it or not.

And by doing so, Nurses can ensure that everything possible is taken into consideration before making any final decisions about our action.

Like in this case, we take a step back and we check all of the charts to see what could be wrong with the patient.

Examples Of Critical Thinking In Practice

But let's be more visual about this.

Imagine you are about to enter into a patient room and before that you check the patient chart.

You deduce that this patient might be experiencing some pain, due to the blood results that shows high potassium levels.

So you assume that this pain may be caused by their kidney condition.

Which is supported by the patient reporting this pain when asked.

So you use your critical thinking skills to decide whether or not to order the analgesic medication before speaking with the patient that might be experiencing this pain because of the high potassium levels.

Or, another example could be for the Nurses in A&E when they make triage decisions.

With an overflow of patients and limited staff, they must evaluate which patients should be treated first.

While they rely on their training to measure the vital signs or the level of consciousness, they use their critical thinking skills to analyse the consequences of delaying treatment in each case.

No matter which department we work in, Nurses use critical thinking in our everyday routines.

When we face decisions that could ultimately mean life or death, the ability to analyse the situation and come to a solution, separates the good Nurses three ‘top’ ways.

Improving Nursing Care Through Critical Thinking

First one.

In a clinical experience, Nurses should use a case-based approach.

This method uses an actual patient situation as a starting point and then allows you to research further by your own, by going through relevant articles on books, websites within the field.

The idea behind this approach, is that you will benefit from having more knowledge, which allows you to understand how often these cases come up and the type of concerns the patient suffers when they face them.

To get the most out of this approach, you would need to remember where did you find this information. So you can find it again when you need it.

Secondly, you can also do some critical thinking exercises.

There are many functional, critical thinking exercises that you could do on your own.

But one of the easiest ways for Nurses to test their abilities, is by looking at some examples and then working out what steps they would need to take to solve such a problem in the most effective way.

And the third technique could be to use a Nursing process.

When it comes to using critical thinking processes in Nursing, you will need to identify all of the factors that are involved in performing your task.

And then, you make sure that you are working out in the order in which they should happen.

This method help Nurses to avoid making mistakes or taking unnecessary risk, by answering that everything possible has been thought through before acting on anything.

Critical thinking in Nursing can keep Nurses at the top of their game by ensuring that they are constantly working to find out more about our profession and how we can become better at it.

By using different strategies, Nurses can make sure that any knowledge we learn is relevant and accurate for the needs of our situations.

You are now well aware of the importance of critical thinking and skills in Nursing.

Nurses who use critical thinking skills are less likely to make mistakes or take unnecessary risks because we have gone through a decision making process.

Critical Thinking Takes Practice

If you use critical thinking skills every day, you should keep working on improving them.

Because the more you practice it, the better you will come.

And the more naturally it will come to you.

I hope you like this video.

And if you want to check more videos like this, you can visit nurses.co.uk.

Have a good day.