How Does Clinical Reasoning Cycle In Nursing Work? – Learn It!
Clinical reasoning is a process that nurses or clinicians use to collect cues, process the data, and understand the healthcare plan of a patient. It is a reasoning process that employs interventions, assesses the consequences, and makes decisions accordingly. Because of sound clinical reasoning, nurses can do what is best for their patients. If you are a nursing student and need to write a paper on what is the clinical reasoning cycle in nursing practice, this post will help you out. You may also use the information we have given to enhance your understanding of this crucial reasoning cycle.
What Is Clinical Reasoning In Nursing Practice?
Before you understand clinical reasoning in detail, it’s crucial to know why it is needed. Nurses make various decisions and judgments in healthcare. They are required to constantly navigate complex situations. If they do not have deep-thinking skills, it will be hard for them to respond to patients with a myriad of health concerns and needs. Nurses with positive clinical reasoning skills can detect any untoward changes in a patient’s health. Therefore, they can rescue them from suffering promptly.
Nursing is a reflective cycle. It majorly involves interactions between clinicians, their patients, and numerous environmental factors. Since it is a dynamic process, clinical reasoning also does not follow a singular pattern. It is a series of spiral of interconnected and constantly occurring clinical encounters and situations.
The clinical reasoning process is a set of systematic steps. These steps involve sensible considerations. When nurses adopt this process, they can think about their patient’s healthcare plans. The series of steps involved in clinical reasoning leads to a final decision that emphasizes what is optimal for a patient according to his or her condition at that time. This is why it is said that nursing studies should put more focus on clinical reasoning competence. The greater competence a nurse has, the more their ability to cope with complicated situations when dealing with patients.
The Seven Stages Of Clinical Reasoning Cycle
The clinical reasoning cycle consists of eight primary phases or steps. The differences between the phases are not entirely evident, though. Although the steps of clinical thinking can be divided into look, collect, process, decide, plan, act, evaluate, and reflect, in practice, these phases frequently overlap and have hazy borders. Let us study these stages in greater detail.
Look Or Consider The Situation Of Your Patient
This is the stage in which a clinical case is initially introduced to you. This is where you get the patient’s presentation details and current health status. For instance, a newborn who has just been brought to the NICU due to neonatal jaundice. Although it is a crucial step, the burse’s prejudices and presumptions may have a harmful impact.
Gathering Data
During this stage, you take into account the patient’s past medical history, the history of presenting complaints, the current treatment plan, the findings of any investigations, and the patient’s vital signs. After that, you analyze the data to identify cues and derive information using your prior understanding of physiology, pharmacology, pathology, culture, and ethics.
Cue collecting necessitates recalling relevant knowledge in addition to evaluating current information and acquiring new information. Note that it also needs a detailed understanding of pharmacology, pathophysiology, and physiology about ethics and patient care. It also involves recalling knowledge relevant to the existing health of the patient. The professional must have complete knowledge of the patient’s condition to be able to clinically reason well. This impacts her ability to assess cues.
Processing the Collected Information
Processing information is the third stage of the clinical reasoning cycle. In this stage, the nurse analyzes the gathered information. After that, they look for anomalies in it. The nurse groups the cues into different categories and makes inferences.
The more experienced nurse relates the cues with situations they have experienced in the past. At the same time, they also think about any problems that may arise if they take a specific action.
Determine the Reason for the Existing Patient State
After the nurse has processed the cues, she will then be able to know what is causing the current condition of the patient. She will synthesize the facts and make a diagnosis of the issue. An example of it is identifying that the patient does not have adequate blood in their body, and the injection has made their blood pressure worse.
Set up the Desired Outcomes
In this stage of clinical reasoning, the nurse will clarify the goals of the healthcare plan. She prioritizes them according to their needs. These goals tackle the diagnosis that has been done in the preceding stage.
For example, the nurse will set up a goal to improve the blood flow in the patient and increase his blood pressure in the next two hours.
Take the Appropriate Course of Action
Taking action is the 6th stage of the clinical reasoning cycle. The nurse chooses the most feasible action to achieve healthcare goals. This action directly addresses the diagnosis that was made in the 4th stage. For example, the nurse will inform the doctor to get an order to improve the IV rate of the patient.
Assess the Effectiveness of the Action
This is the stage of reflection in clinical reasoning. During this time, the nurse looks back on what they learned from the case. Also, they think about an alternative that could have impacted the outcome for the better. This stage lets nurses examine their experience and learn more about what they did and its reasons.
Summing up
Clinical reasoning makes a nurse think critically. She analyzes her actions and aims to improve them. This makes them steer clear of illogical thoughts and actions. As a result, they provide the most accurate care. If you are a nursing student and want to learn about clinical reasoning in more detail, contact our experts at assignmenthelpro.