Nurses moves from novice to expert (Essay Sample)

Critical Thinking
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Critical Thinking
In my 5 years’ experience as a nurse, I have come to establish that nurses are faced with day to day challenges that require them to make critical and rational clinical decisions. As a novice in my nursing career, I referred from books and the nursing guidelines to make all my decisions. Although I still refer from books when faced with a challenging situation, the difference now is that I am open minded to other alternatives. As a novice, I was keen to follow the rules to the later but still found myself making a lot of errors and using a lot of time to achieve a small task. I wondered how experienced nurses achieved successful results easily and in a short span of time. Being open minded and after facing numerous clinical experiences, I have been able to foster a greater depth of knowledge and critical thinking which I now apply in my clinical decision making (Horvath & Forte, 2011).
Critical thinking is used in clinical practice as a guide of applying conceptualized, analyzed and synthesized information generated or gathered from observation, experience or communication. Critical thinking helps nurses to come up with informed decisions that eliminate the likelihood of making errors (Rubenfeld & Scheffer, 2010). Errors usually occur because of overreliance on past experiences which contains unconscious bias.
Nurses who uses critical thinking skills adhere to nursing intellectual principles. They wide and deep and will continually question their beliefs as well as take time to reflect on their reasoning processes. Critical thinking skills therefore supports clinical competence by enhancing provision of better quality health care to patients. Critical thinkers strives to eliminate obstacles such as irrelevant non logical and conflicting reasoning processes all of which hinder clear critical thinking. They think systematically thereby understanding the patient’s needs better (Marchigiano, et al. 2011).
The critical thinking strategies I use to improve your clinical competence are;
* Identification of the problem.
* Being clear of what I need to achieve.
* Exploration of my view point (reference base) on the problem.
* Examining my assumptions and beliefs upon which I base my point of view or claims.
* Listing down the concepts, principles or theories am using to solve the problem
* Collection of data or/and information that best support point of view on the issue.
* Illustration of the implications that follows my claims on the issue.
A correlation exists between critical thinking and nursing practice. This is because critical thinking is indispensable in nursing practice but critical thinking is not an influential factor for gaining a scholarship and therefore no gre...