1 postsRe: Topic 2 DQ 1

Evidence-base practice is defined as “the integration of clinical expertise, the most up-to-date research, the patient’s preferences to formulate and implement best practices for patient care” (Dean, Falker, Green, et al., 2018). As a nurse, there are so many things that aren’t black and white. This means that we will need to do a lot of problem solving, brainstorming, and research. As a nurse, we will want to find the most recent, reliable, and realistic information we can to treat our patient to ensure the best possible outcome for them and that’s really what evidence-based practice is all about.

Critical Thinking is defined as “all of part of the process or questioning, analysis, synthesis, interpretation, inference, inductive and deductive reasoning, intuition, application, and creativity. Critial thinking underlies independent and interdependent decision making” (Dean, Falker, Green, et al., 2018). It’s obvious that critical thinking has a ton of components, but so does the nursing profession. So often on nursing tests we see questions that read something like “based on (x, y, and z), the nurse would question administering which medication?”. Or we have questions like “a lab result came back showing (x, y, and z) for a patient who has CHF, what does this indicate?”. Nurses are constantly doing things like that, and I think with experience your critical thinking skills will progress and the intuition part of critical thinking will be one of those things that will definitely develop. 

I definitely think that critical thinking and evidence-based practice go hand-in-hand. If any single patient has a group of nurses constantly researching and developing care plans that fit their needs and provide the safest and most effective treatment, there should be little to no reason why patient outcomes aren’t positive most of the time. There is also always new teaching that nurses can implement into their patient teachings and more research that can suggest better and effective nursing interventions which in turn will lead to a better patient outcome.