How Nurses Influence Patient Advocacy and Policymaking Using Critical Thinking

The Antecedents and Consequences of Decision-Making and Critical Thinking on Healthcare Policy and Patient Advocacy

Although some aspects of critical thinking and effective decision-making such as inquisitiveness and open-mindedness are inherent and natural to each individual, other antecedents to critical thinking such as possessing background knowledge and experience require time to develop. As the debate over nature versus nurture continues, most authorities agree that a combination of both is most influential in shaping people’s critical thinking abilities. To learn more, the purpose of this paper is to systematically discuss the antecedents and consequences of decision-making and critical thinking and their impact on healthcare policy and patient advocacy. Following this discussion, a summary of the findings is provided in the paper’s conclusion.

Review and Discussion

Antecedents of Decision-Making and Critical Thinking

Effective decision-making and critical thinking are vital antecedents for nurses to positively influence healthcare policy change and responsibly serve as patient advocates.

Nurses must carefully observe patients’ needs, accurately assess health issues, and use evidence-based practices to make decisions in complex situations. In this regard, Lee and Oh (2020) emphasize that, “Critical thinking is considered to be a crucial element for clinical decision-making by nurses” (p. 1).

Not surprisingly, nurses have been encouraged, if not specifically trained, to develop their critical thinking skills in ways that will promote objective inquiry, open-mindedness, and cognition (Kaldal et al., 2023). For instance, Lee and Oh report that, “Affective dispositions such as being open-minded, inquisitive, and seeking truth can stimulate an individual towards using critical thinking through a reasoning process” (p. 2). The consequences of these antecedents include timely and informed healthcare policies and nursing practice that are better configured to improve public health through safely meeting diverse care needs, overcoming healthcare disparities, and compassionately engaging patients as partners in evidence-based care aligned with their values and priorities as discussed further below.

Consequences for Healthcare Policy:

Being front-line healthcare providers, nurses are in well situated to identify opportunities for improvement in policies that affect patient care. For example, professional codes and standards for practice require nurses to carefully observe inadequacies and inconsistencies in healthcare delivery within their organizations that negatively impact patients under their care. Therefore, by sharpening critical thinking abilities through assessing patient needs, evaluating system-wide inefficiencies, and identifying policy gaps, nurses can gain crucial insight into reforms needed to improve health outcomes (Kaldal et al., 2023).

In addition, nurses also have an ethical duty to advocate for healthcare laws, regulations, and programs that increase quality of care, access, cost-efficiency, and health equity across diverse populations, a need that has intensified in recent years. Likewise, effective nurse advocacy gives patients and communities an empowered voice to transform flawed healthcare systems. The consequence of these outcomes is evolving healthcare policy that is better configured to overcome healthcare disparities, compassionately meet community needs, and align treatment delivery with individual patient values (Inayat et al., 2023). Besides this type of advocacy, nurses are also expected to serve an essential role as patient advocates as discussed below.

Consequences for Patient Advocacy:

Fundamental to ethical nursing practice is advocating for the health interests of patients who are often disempowered by imbalance medical power structures. By observing care experiences, assessing cultural factors, and identifying barriers patients face getting services or treatment, nurses gain unique understanding of patients’ goals, values and priorities. Nurses leverage this insight with analytical expertise, evidence-based recommendations, and interdisciplinary coordination to ensure patients and their support network are fully informed, heard, and centered making healthcare decisions. Nurse patient advocacy—within interactions and through policy reform—ultimately seeks to overcome system inequities and clinical paternalism by promoting patients as empowered, respected partners in directing the course of their care aligned with personal health priorities.

A study by Alanezi (2022) found that nurses were more likely to advocate on policy issues jeopardizing patient safety versus policies threatening nurses’ jobs for that advocacy. Additionally, female nurses and those possessing higher nursing degrees demonstrated greater advocacy engagement. A strong correlation existed between nurses’ cognitive understanding of advocacy importance and their attendant behavioral intentions to actively advocate. In summary, when feeling empowered in their setting and compelled by patient need, many nurses displayed receptive patient advocacy outlooks and indicated willingness to intervene through appropriate channels (Alanezi, 2022).

Conclusion

The research showed that through careful observation of patient needs and system limitations, nurses hone analytical skills to identify problematic healthcare delivery trends requiring policy changes that improve health outcomes, costs, access, and equity. By leveraging decision-making expertise and evidence-based assessment of solutions, nurses have an ethical duty to give patients an informed, empowered voice advocating for patient-centered, compassionate policies and treatment delivery models aligned with their values. The research also showed that the same antecedent of critical thinking such as inquisitiveness and open-mindedness compel many individuals to pursue careers in the helping professions including most especially nursing. This also means that many nurses are already “hard-wired” for effective critical thinking and decision-making, but the research was also consistent in stressing the need for nurses to develop expertise, cultivate skepticism toward over-simplistic explanations, and pursue lifelong professional development opportunities in order to make substantive differences in policy formulations and meaningful contributions to patient advocacy.