Critical Thinking Flashcards
The ability to think in a systematic and logical manner with openness to question and reflect on the reasoning process.
Critical Thinking
Involves open-mindedness, continual inquiry, and perseverance, combined with a willingness to look at each unique patient situation and determine which identified assumptions are true and relevant.
A critical thinker considers what is important in each clinical situation, imagines and explores alternatives, considers ethical principles, and makes informed decisions about the care of patients.
This requires careful reasoning… choosing the options for the best patient outcomes on the basis of a patient’s condition and the priority of the problem:
Clinical Decision Making
This is a visual representation of patient problems and interventions that shows their relationships to one another:
Concept Map
It is a nonlinear picture of a patient to be used for comprehensive care planning. It’s primary purpose is to better synthesize relevant data about a patient, including assessment data, nursing diagnoses, health needs, nursing interventions, and evaluation measures… you learn to organize or connect information in a unique way so the info begins to form meaningful patterns.
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Decision Making
This begins after you have gathered information about a patient… It is the analytical process for determining a patient’s health problems:
Diagnostic Reasoning
Accurate recognition of a patient’s problems is necessary before you decide on solutions and implement action. It requires you to assign meaning to the behaviors ans physical signs and symptoms presented by a patient.
Knowledge based on research or clinical expertise:
Evidence-based Knowledge.
Makes you an informed critical thinker.
This is part of diagnostic reasoning… It is the process of drawing conclusions from related pieces of evidence and previous experience with the evidence:
Inference
When making an inference, you form patterns of information from data before making a diagnosis.
This is applied as a competency when delivering patient care… It’s purpose is to diagnose and treat human responses to actual or potential health problems:
Nursing Process
5 steps (ADPIE):
- ASSESSMENT
- DIAGNOSIS
- PLANNING
- IMPLEMENTATION
- EVALUATION
Involves evaluating a situation over time, identifying possible solutions, and trying a solution over time to make sure that it is effective:
Problem Solving
It becomes necessary to try different options if a problem recurs. These add to the nurses’s experience.
Turning over a subject in the mind and thinking about it seriously:
Reflection.
It involves purposeful thinking back or recalling a situation to discover its purpose or meaning.
This 5 step method is used when testing research questions:
Scientific Method.
- Identify the problem
- Collect data
- Formulate a question or hypothesis
- Test the question or hypothesis
- Evaluate results of the test/study.
This is a tendency, inclination, feeling, or opinion that is preconceived or unreasoned:
Bias
You must be aware of your biases and keep them in check!
Lucidity as to perception or understanding, freedom from ambiguity:
Clarity
Reason or sound judgement. Principle of governing correct/reliable inference:
Logic
By doing this, skilled clinical decision making occurs… It has 2 components (1) a nurse’s understanding of a specific patient and (2) his or her subsequent selection of interventions
Knowing the Patient.
This is central to individualizing nursing care so a patient feels cared for and cared about.
Knowing the patient is an in-depth knowledge of a patient’s patterns of responses within a clinical situation and knowing the patient as a person.
