Paper
Sunday, November 4, 2007
263
Critical Thinking and Clinical Judgment
Noreen C. Facione, PhD, RN, FAAN, Physiological Nursing, University of California San Francisco (UCSF), San Francisco, CA, USA and Peter Facione, PhD, Office of the Provost, Loyola University of Chicao, Chicago, IL, USA.
| Learning Objective #1: identify and critique the critical thinking component in an example of a complex clinical judgment. |
| Learning Objective #2: describe several common thinking errors that threaten the quality of our clinical judgments and potentially put patients at risk. |
Lives depend on competent clinical reasoning. Thus it is a moral imperative for health care providers to strive to monitor and improve their clinical reasoning and care related judgments. Knowing that this is the agreement owed to the public trust, agencies responsible for the accreditation of professional training programs and for the oversight of health care delivery have mandated the need to demonstrate competence in clinical reasoning in health care clinicians and students. The purpose of this paper is to outline the research on human reasoning processes as it applies to clinical reasoning, and to describe implications for improving clinical reasoning. Papers from basic science investigations on human reasoning as well as educational research on training clinical judgment will be reviewed. These will include both theoretical discussions and data based studies as the timing of the presentation permits. Examples of common clinical reasoning errors will be presented as the timing of the presentation permits. We have made this type of material easy to understand and use by clinicians around the world. Guidelines for clinicians and nurse educators will be discussed. Note that we propose to summarize information that we believe is important to nurses and nurse educators globally, but that the offering would need to be brief in a typical podium presentation.