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Clinical Reasoning

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Clinical reasoning, evidenced based practice and my application of both in nursing practice

Clinical reasoning, evidenced based practice and my application of both in nursing practice
Simmons (2009) states “clinical reasoning guides nurses in assessing, assimilating, retrieving, and/or discarding components of information that affect patient care” (p. 1151). I feel that without clinical reasoning nurses would just be going through the motion of caring for a patient with no specific outcome in mind. Because of the autonomous work of the nurse in many settings clinical reasoning is a skill that must be fine-tuned. There will not always be others to collaborate with on the care of patients and therefore the practicing nurse must feel confident in her decision of what type of care to provide, this is where her skills of clinical reasoning (cognitive process) come in and she is able to decide on the type of care to be given based off of her skills alone. The following are some of the different types of clinical reasoning out there.
1. Subjective expected utility theory, which explains how, decisions ‘ought’ to be made using mathematical estimation of highest probability. (Simmons, 2009, p. 1153).
2. Information processing theory, which focuses on how decisions are made, not how they should be made. (Simmons, 2009, p. 1153).
3. Hypothetico-deductive method which is a medical descriptive model based on information processing. (Simmons, 2009, p. 1153).
4. Benner’s model of skill acquisition in nursing which ranks a person’s performance according to five levels of proficiency includes clinical reasoning within this model as well.
There are many attributes of clinical reasoning as Simmons (2009) points out they are: data analysis, deliberation, heuristics, inference, metacognition, logic, cognition, information processing and intuition (p.

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