Professional Nursing – Journal Article Annotation
Nurses face an endless variety of situations which involves clients, family members, health care staff, and peers. Each of the situations that nurses face pose new experiences and problems involving clients’ care, different approaches to resolving problems, and different results as to whether approaches were successful.
Each clinical situation that nurses face everyday requires careful and thoughtful analysis for accurate and sound clinical decisions and plans to be developed for each client.
The article argues that critical thinking is indeed an essential part of the nursing profession. It is not enough that a nurse has abstract knowledge; he or she also has to develop the intellectual capacity to contextualize and to adjust what he/she knows in particular cases.
The key ideas that the authors and are trying to communicate in this article are the relationship of critical thinking and intuitive practice to the expertise in nursing. It is true that aside for developing this while still a student nurse, nurses also gain knowledge through their experiences. Every clinical experience becomes a lesson which will serve as a guide and information for the nurse.
It is not only the authors that consider critical thinking and intuitive practice as important, but other authors in the nursing discipline as well. In every clinical situation, it is important for a nurse to think critically and make sound judgments so that clients ultimately receive the very best nursing care. Critical thinking is not a simple step-by-step, linear process that can be learned overnight. It is a process acquired only through hard work, commitment, and an active curiosity toward learning.
Nurses are responsible for making accurate and appropriate clinical decisions. Critical thinking is very important as no two clients have the same needs. The nurse after assessment and diagnosis has to employ critical thinking skills for a client’s particular condition.
Intuition is simply a result of common experiences and applied to new ones. After a nurse has been exposed to a certain situation and is exposed to another similar situation, the nurse uses her intuition along with her critical thinking skills to develop an approach for the client. Intuition in nursing thus develops as a nurse’s clinical experience increases.
A nurse is always challenged to observe each of his or her clients closely, search for and examine ideas and judgments about the problems that the clients face. Additionally the nurse has to consider scientific principles that he/she have learned and relate this to the clients’ problem, recognize the problems, and develop the right approach to nursing care as appropriate to the situation and problem of the client.
Intuition is thus considered by authors as a trigger which brings about in the nurse an analytical process that leads them in a search to acquire data that confirms what they have sensed in the client or in a particular situation. Intuition thus triggers the nurse to apply his/her critical thinking skills in a situation in order to come up with the right thing to do or the right answer to a problem being presented.
Nurses must not make snap judgments just by their intuition alone. This could jeopardize the client’s situation and perhaps affect the nursing quality of care for the patient.
As a student nurse, knowing and understanding what critical thinking is and its importance very important. The article points out that a student nurse has to develop this skill. Critical thinking begins for a student when the student seriously asks questions, and in continuing way attempts to answer questions like “what do I really know about this nursing care situation?” or “how do I know it?” This is actually a process which is developed within the student nurse with the aid of other individuals like the educators.
Students in nursing must learn nursing by consciously practicing reasoning skills needed in nursing. Students in nursing must also critically reason their way through nursing principles, concepts and theories as much as possible so that appropriate and accurate application of knowledge occurs naturally in clinical practice.
As stated in the article, the purpose of reflective, critical thinking is to ensure that the nurse has the depth of knowledge necessary to immediately comprehend the practice situation so that safe, effective, quality nursing care is provided to the clients. Intuitive practice and critical thinking can significantly affect the quality of care delivered by the nurses to their patients.
It is important to remember that the quality of nursing practice depends on the nurse’s ability to use all types of cognitive and emotional cues associated with a situation to trigger critical thinking and then to select effective nursing interventions.
A nurse cannot safely act on intuition alone that is why critical thinking and intuition both have to go together in order to achieve expertise in the nursing profession. Intuition requires critical thinking as much as critical thinking needs intuition.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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