In nursing practice, critical thinking plays a crucial role of providing a nurse with the necessary skills for prioritizing and making key decision that would save lives. There is a high degree of sensitivity in clinical practice, which means that a simple error could result in serious repercussions like loss of life for the patient (Victor-Chmil, 2013). Therefore, it is vital that a nurse has the requisite critical thinking skills. Nurses are responsible for the well-being of the patients and they should make use of all the skills they have attained in order to offer the patient the best care. The role of a nurse requires that they have the relevant framework for critical thinking. For example, making use of critical thinking, a nurse can develop sufficient procedure for allocating the available resources. This would assist in determining the relevant tasks required for specific situations and have the required resources available for these tasks.
Nurses can also use critical thinking to solve the numerous ethical dilemmas that they are faced with each day. For example, there are some pain-relieving medications that could have serious side effects on a patient and the nurse would need to employ critical thinking in order to determine if prescribing the medication...
This demonstrates that critical thinking assists the nurse in making the right decision. Critical thinking skill assists the nurse to evaluate the effects of an action before they perform the action. There are some nursing actions that have the potential to cause harm to a patient and others would be beneficial to the patient. Without having the necessary critical thinking skills, the nurse would not be able to determine the effects of an action.
Improving Clinical Competence by Employing Critical Thinking
Critical thinking has the ability to create an essential framework that can be used to improve nursing practice. Nursing practitioners are required to deliver the highest standards of healthcare at all times to patients. This means that a nurse must be competent when he/she is offering healthcare services. Without sufficient critical thinking skills, a nurse would find it hard to maintain high standards of patient care. With critical thinking, a nursing practitioner attains a better understanding of various situations that they might be faced with in the performance of his/her tasks (Martyn, Terwijn, Kek, & Huijser, 2014). Therefore, critical thinking facilitates for the nurse to employ…
