PMID: 10953693
Issn Print: 0002-0443
Publication Date: 2000/07/01
Improving Managers' Critical Thinking Skills: Student-Generated Case Studies
Excerpt
Nurse managers need expert critical thinking skills to make the best decisions in rapidly changing, complex healthcare organizations. Decreasing healthcare reimbursement and increasing technology challenge previously established, learned norms. For example, the length of stay of hospitalized patients has decreased more than could be imagined 5 or 10 years ago. Nurses are now challenged with managing nursing units that are constantly admitting and discharging patients with higher acuity, motivating a variety of diverse professionals and nonprofessional staff, and budgeting demands of staffing and patients with decreasing resources. Improving critical thinking skills in nurse managers improves their decision-making, problem-solving, and communication with others. These skills are crucial in a work place now characterized by turbulence, mergers, and constant job redesign.1
Critical thinking is the reasoning by which nurse managers analyze the use of language, clarify and explicate assumptions, formulate problems, weigh evidence, evaluate conclusions, discriminate between arguments, and seek to justify facts and clarify values.2 Through critical thinking, nurse managers assimilate information and reach a logical conclusion by examining all options. Nurse managers then can implement a solution to the problem and evaluate the response, modifying or changing strategies, if necessary.
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