Critical Thinking Examples In Nursing & Why It's Important

Critical thinking is the ability to question your assumptions, sit with ambiguity, and reason your way to a decision. In practice it means identifying problems and biases, drawing sound conclusions, and judging what information actually matters in a given situation. For nurses, it is the difference between completing tasks and keeping patients safe.

Nicholas McGowan, BSN, RN, CCRN, has spent 10 years in critical care across neurological trauma, cardiovascular, and surgical intensive care. He defines critical thinking as "necessary for problem-solving and decision-making by healthcare providers. It is a process where people use a logical process to gather information and take purposeful action based on their evaluation."

"This cognitive process is vital for excellent patient outcomes because it requires that nurses make clinical decisions using a variety of different lenses, such as fairness, ethics, and evidence-based practice," he says.

How nurses use critical thinking

Strong nurses think past their assigned tasks. A nurse might be changing a wound dressing, passing medications, and monitoring vital signs through a shift. It takes critical thinking to connect a change in the wound to a shift in blood pressure and temperature, and to recognize when that change demands immediate intervention.

Nurses also juggle many patients at once. Critical thinking is what keeps safety and care from slipping while you manage competing demands.

Jenna Liphart Rhoads, PhD, RN, is a nurse educator with a background in surgical-trauma adult critical care, where clear thinking and fast action were essential to patient safety. "Nurses must also critically think to determine which patient to see first, which medications to pass first, and the order in which to organize their day caring for patients," she says. "Patient conditions and environments are continually in flux, therefore nurses must constantly be evaluating and re-evaluating information they gather to keep their patients safe."

COVID-19 made the stakes obvious. On the general floor and in the ICU, nurses had to test long-held assumptions and deliver excellent care while conserving scarce resources. Crystal Slaughter, an advanced practice nurse in the ICU and a nurse educator, watched it happen. "Nurses are at the patient's bedside and are often the first ones to detect issues. Then, the nurse needs to gather the appropriate subjective and objective data from the patient to frame a concise problem statement or question for the physician or advanced practice provider," she explains.

Five ways to sharpen your critical thinking

1. Use a case-based approach. Slaughter mentors students the way a detective approaches a mystery: ask what you have, what you're missing, and what it means. "What is going on? What information am I missing? Can I get that information? What does that information mean for the patient? How quickly do I need to act?" Form a group, work through case studies with a mentor, and you build analytical and collaborative skills in a low-stakes setting.

2. Practice self-reflection. "Nurses should reflect upon what went well or did not go well in their workday and identify areas of improvement or situations in which they should have reached out for help," Rhoads says. You already do a version of this after a tense conversation, replaying it and rethinking your responses. Apply the same habit to clinical decisions. Did you need more information before you acted? Could you have asked better questions? Try running a problem in reverse: if you had assumed you'd find a wound infection, how would that have changed your plan for the dressing change?

3. Develop a questioning mind. "Critical thinking is a self-driven process," McGowan says. "It isn't something that can simply be taught. Rather, it is something that you practice and cultivate with experience." Meaningful questions lead to useful answers, and learning to ask them is its own skill. Practice it in calm moments until it becomes habit, so it's there when a patient's care depends on it.

4. Stay present in the moment. A hectic shift pulls your focus in every direction. Staying present lets you anticipate what's coming, such as bringing extra lubricant for a catheterization or extra gloves for a dressing change. It also sharpens your active listening, which gives you better information to act on.

5. Use a process. Ask questions, gather information, implement a strategy, evaluate the results, and consider another point of view. These map onto the nursing process: assess, diagnose, plan, implement, evaluate. That last step, considering another perspective, is also your best defense against personal bias.

Common pitfalls

Your brain runs on shortcuts, and some of those shortcuts lead you wrong. McGowan puts personal bias at the top of the list. "We all form biases based on our own experiences. However, nurses have to learn to separate their own biases from each patient encounter to avoid making false assumptions that may interfere with their care," he says. Strong critical thinkers accept that they have biases and watch for them.

A task-oriented mindset is the other big trap, and new nurses are especially prone to it during the jump from school to practice. "Consider a patient whose blood pressure is low but who also needs to take a blood pressure medication at a scheduled time," Slaughter says. "A task-oriented nurse may provide the medication without regard for the patient's blood pressure because medication administration is a task that must be completed. A nurse employing critical thinking skills would address the low blood pressure, review the patient's blood pressure history and trends, and potentially call the physician to discuss whether medication should be withheld."

Fear and pride get in the way too. Your worldview gives you comfort and guidance, but it can cloud your judgment when you face someone whose beliefs differ from yours, or stop you from pursuing a line of questioning that would help the patient. Nurses with strong critical thinking skills tend to learn from their own mistakes and others', welcome changes that improve care, treat each interaction as part of a whole, weigh new events against past knowledge, solve problems with colleagues, carry themselves with confidence, and actively keep their biases from reaching the bedside.

An essential skill for every nurse

Critical thinking protects patients and drives your career. Clinical and administrative leaders are expected to have it, and you build it the same way you build any clinical skill: by using these strategies deliberately, day after day, until sharp thinking is simply how you work.

Frequently asked questions

How do nurses use critical thinking in practice? The cause of a patient's pain or decline is often unclear. Nurses use their knowledge to narrow down what might be wrong, collect the vital information, and decide quickly how to respond.

Where do nurses learn it? Nursing school supplies the foundation: diseases, anatomy, physiology, and how to improve overall well-being. Supervised clinicals are where students practice applying that knowledge to real decisions.

Who needs critical thinking skills? Everyone who gives patient care. Licensed practical nurses, registered nurses, nurse managers, and advanced practice nurses all rely on it to make decisions that can save lives.