Critical Thinking

Critical thinking and the nursing process

Assessment/Data collection

Collect information about a client’s present health status to identify needs, and to identify additional data to collect based on findings.

Critical Thinking Skills

  • Observe.

  • Use correct techniques for collecting data.

  • Differentiate between relevant and irrelevant data, and between important and unimportant data.

  • Organize, categorize, and validate data.

  • Interpret assessment data and draw a conclusion.

Analysis/Diagnosis/Data collection

Interpret or monitor the collected database, reach an appropriate nursing judgment about a client’s health status and coping mechanisms, and provide direction for nursing care. While analysis helps the nurse establish diagnoses for the client, it occurs in an ongoing manner throughout the nursing process.

Critical Thinking Skills

  • Identify clusters and cues.

  • Detect inferences.

  • Recognize an actual or potential problem or risk.

  • Avoid making judgments.

Planning

Establish priorities and optimal outcomes of care to measure and evaluate. Then, select the nursing interventions to include in a client’s plan of care to promote, maintain, or restore health.

Critical Thinking Skills

  • Identify goals and outcomes for client care.

  • Set priorities.

  • Determine appropriate strategies and interventions for inclusion on a client’s plan of care or teaching plan.

  • Take knowledge and apply it to more than one situation.

  • Create outcome criteria. 

  • Theorize.

  • Consider the consequences of implementation.

Implementation

Provide care based on assessment data, analyses, and the plan of care.

Critical Thinking Skills

  • Use knowledge base.

  • Use appropriate skills and teaching strategies.

  • Test theories.

  • Delegate and supervise nursing care.

  • Communicate appropriately in response to a situation.

Evaluation

Examine a client’s response to nursing interventions and form a clinical judgment about meeting goals and outcomes.

Critical Thinking Skills

  • Determine accuracy of theories.

  • Evaluate outcomes based on specific criteria.

  • Determine understanding of teaching.