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We are going to talk about critical thinking. This is one of my favorite topics not just in nursing, but in general because it
For more information, visit www.nursing.com/cornell
Get unlimited access to lessons and study tools
We are going to talk about critical thinking. This is one of my favorite topics not just in nursing, but in general because it is a skill that you must develop. You must develop critical thinking skills, and I’m sure you’ve been told that over, and over, and over again, but no one tells you how. They tell you, “You have to start thinking critically,” but we’re going to show you exactly how to think critically and how you can apply it immediately in your practice and just in life in general.
This is our definition of what we believe critical thinking is. We believe it’s the ability to recognize a problem, gather information, evaluate possible options, and communicate with others quickly and efficiently to get the best possible clinical outcomes. Recognize, gather, evaluate, communicate, and get the best possible outcomes you can. Now like I said guys, this is something that you can develop now. It’s something you already have been doing, but we want to strengthen that muscle. Critical thinking is like a muscle. You can strengthen it. It can become stronger and stronger until eventually it’s just completely second nature. So, really it’s just the application of the nursing process by instinct. It develops over time. It’s like a muscle, but it requires practice. Essentially there’s just four steps to critical thinking. We have a cheat sheet on this and I’m just going to introduce it here because we’re going to talk about it more in depth as we go on. The first step is suspending all judgment. Notice how I’ve capitalized all in each of these. That’s so important. It’s not suspending some judgment, it’s suspending all judgment. We’ll talk about that. Then it’s collecting all information. Then it’s balancing all information, and then it’s making a holistic decision.
So, the first step is to suspend all judgements. This means that we want to make sure we’re being completely objective about the situation. We can’t allow ourselves to decide anything to quickly. If you’ve already made up your mind about a situation you’re going to have blinders on, right. [inaudible] your eyeballs and you’re going to have blinders on to where you can’t see everything that’s going on out here. You’re seeing such this narrow scope just like you’re looking through little tiny binoculars backwards, and all you can see is just this little speck, and you’re missing all this beauty of nature. So, make sure you take those blinders off and you suspend every judgment that you can. You got to look beyond the obvious. It might be that one thing that you’re looking at 95% of the time or that thing that you’re thinking off, but you got to take those blinders off because that 5% of the time you still got to be a nurse and you still got to make good decisions. A nurse who suspends all judgment never ignores a patients complaint. It’s going to help you avoid bias, and it’s going to help you make good clinical decisions.
Let’s use an example patient throughout this lesson to help you guys, and I’m going to tell you another story at the end as well about critical thinking. So, let’s say you have a patient who just came back from abdominal surgery. He’s complaining of pain repeatedly for the last couple hours. Now the tele monitor is showing a heart rate elevated in the 120s … whoops … 120s. If you just assume he’s in pain because well that’s obvious he just came back from surgery, and he’s asked five times in the last two hours for pain meds you’ll probably just ignore it until it’s time for his pain meds to be due, but let’s see what happens though if we apply critical thinking. When we actually suspend all judgment. Okay, so let’s go through these and I’m going to talk 