The Value of Critical Thinking in Nursing

Critical thinking is important in every profession. In nursing, one needs to have a thinking pattern for a seamless patient care. Critical thinking in nursing may be defined as a disciplined and systematic intellectual process that may be developed into an effective skill to treat patients. This is a skill that everyone needs to possess especially in nursing.

Students taking up nursing are trained through a process of critical thinking that helps increase their intuitive performance, power and efficiency. Through the training process, students are able to apply the principle learned, and thus work as accountable and responsible care takers in routine nursing activities. Activities like group discussions, team assignments, meetings, games, questionnaire, and among others are likewise important in their own ways.

Students of nursing are required to develop reasoning skills through various ways and activities like writing, listening and speaking critically. Even reading in depth helps understand others view points and helps better methods of treatment as well as new ways to improve the existing nursing methods for effective patient care.

In nursing, developing critical thinking is invaluable for safe nursing practices. It can be developed and learned through continuous training. Nurses can develop critical thinking skills by asking questions related to much better and effective ways of safe nursing practices. They must understand patients’ health care and take most suitable and logical steps to treat and solve the problems at hand. In this profession, it is important to seek about the truth and demonstrate tolerance to other views. Nurses who analyze every issue, intellectually and logically develop not just self-confidence but also patient’s confidence, and that is the most rewarding part of nursing reasoning.

Critical thinking helps nurses to develop the methodical and systematic way of thinking. For example, when nurses have reasoning ability, they use thoughts, logic and ideas to figure out the problem or challenging questions. By proper thinking methods, nurses are able to identify that their thinking patterns that may be limited by lack of proper understanding of the concern at hand. Therefore, monitoring the situation critically is utmost significant.

For nurses who develop the habit of critical thinking are able to apply their mental skills for better reasoning. By doing this, nurses are able to effectively focus, gather and collect vital information and eventually treat the patient effectively. The main reason in teaching this approach to nurses is that they are able to develop better understanding of academic and scholarly nursing literature. Critical thinking is indeed an integral part of the nursing profession as it is also significant in every aspect of our lives.