14 Chapter 14 Understand Critical Thinking for Healthcare Career and Readiness

Introduction

You have probably heard about the importance of critical thinking skill for healthcare professionals. Critical thinking is a skill that you will need to practice and service your clients/patients to the best of your abilities as a healthcare professional. It is one of the work-related skills that employers value the most.

You will learn from this section:

Why is critical thinking important for a healthcare professional?

Where does my critical thinking skill stand?

How to develop critical thinking skills?

First thing first – Why is critical thinking important?

Critical thinking is an essential skill to have especially as a healthcare professional. To serve a client and/or patient better, you will need to make a lot of decisions.

To help with your decision making, one often starts with associated information collection.  On the information that you will be collecting, there are questions that you will need to ask before drawing any conclusions. For example, is the information that I have collected reliable and/or valid? Do I have enough information or need more? Do I have one solution or more? Which one is better in terms of the strength and weakness? Quite a process, right? Let’s begin with learning the importance of this skill. View the YouTube clip for a description of the importance of critical thinking.

or enjoy a TEdTalk and learn where did critical thinking come from

Or just click into the hyperlinked source to learn why is critical thinking important: 10 Essential Critical Thinking Skills (And How to Improve Them) | Indeed.com

Next question – Where does my critical thinking skill stand?

Now that you have learned about the importance of critical thinking, it may be helpful to learn where you stand as your preparation as a pre healthcare professional.

This is actually a method to practice critical thinking, in addition to using tools such as the graphic organization, mind map, or decision matrices, et al. Use this link to conduct a self-assessment:

Self-Assessment Tools – Healthcare Workforce Partnership (westernmasshealthcareers.org)

It is perfectly fine to be at the exploring stage.

It is where we all start to improve. Remember the process of becoming a critical thinker. First step is to collection information on the question you are asking or need to find an answer to. Practice your critical thinking in the classes you are taking by asking professor questions and starting a conversation with a classmate. Also, various healthcare professions pose different real-world problems that you need to find solutions for. Here are some tools: Interest Assessment (minnstate.edu) or Health Care Careers | Explore Career Opportunities in the Field of Health Care (healthcarepathway.com) if you need to assess your interest. 

Final step – How to develop critical thinking skills?

After the awareness that you have developed on critical thinking and know that it is a skill that can be practiced, you will find that critical thinking can be practiced anywhere anytime.

It starts with asking questions…

Here are examples of clinical judgement that you may find yourself need to make as a nurse:

Below is a way to practice and improve your readiness as a healthcare professional:

Grow with Google HSI Career Readiness Program | UTRGV

Remember that critical thinking is a skill that can be practiced and improved! So as your readiness!