Critical Thinking: What are your responsibilities as a nurse? • Recognize health problems • Anticipate and plan for problems • Initiate actions to ensure appropriate and timely treatment, patient safety, and optimal health outcomes Critical thinking defined • Intentional higher-level reasoning • Influenced by knowledge, experience, skills, attitudes, and interpersonal skills • Used as a guide for rational judgment and action • Takes time and practice to develop Critical thinking attitudes • Independence – think for themselves • Fair-mindedness – assesses all viewpoints • Insight into egocentricity – biases • Intellectual humility – knows the limit of one’s own knowledge • Intellectual courage to challenge status quo • Integrity – apply the same rigorous standards of proof to their own knowledge and beliefs as they apply to the knowledge and beliefs of others • Perseverance – show perseverance in finding effective solutions to the client and nursing problems • Confidence – leads to trustworthy conclusions • Curiosity – the mind of a critical thinker is filled with questions Diagnostic reasoning • Making sense of the data you collected • Requires critical thinking • Improves with experience, knowledge, and skill • Requires the creation of a diagnostic (working) hypothesis • Consider what is important in a given situation