About: To prepare you for real world practice, this book will highlight content areas most relevant to the bedside and why they must be mastered and understood. To help visualize the professional development that is needed as you transition to the responsibilities of the professional nurse, I use the metaphor of building a house; not a static structure, but a unique, vibrant "living" house that is a reflection of how you choose to build and add to it over time. Nursing is a living and vibrant practice that requires your personal involvement and engagement to promote the well-being of those you care for. The components of this "living" home include: Foundation: A house must have a firm and stable foundation. The ethical comportment or the art of nursing is this foundation for every nurse. Caring behaviors, nurse engagement, and professionalism in practice must be present or your nursing practice could be on shaky ground before it even begins! Walls: The applied sciences of nursing: pharmacology, fluid and electrolytes, and anatomy and physiology. I contextualize these sciences to the bedside so the relevance of mastering this content becomes apparent. Roof: Critical thinking and clinical reasoning, which is the thinking that is required by the nurse that completes the house and ties everything together. Skeletons in the closet: Every house has closets and some have a few skeletons in them! Incivility and men in nursing will be explored in detail!

An Australian text designed to address the key area of clinical reasoning in nursing practice. Using a series of authentic scenarios, Clinical Reasoning guides students through the clinical reasoning process while challenging them to think critically about the nursing care they provide. With scenarios adapted from real clinical situations that occurred in healthcare and community settings, this edition continues to address the core principles for the provision of quality care and the prevention of adverse patient outcomes.

The manual is divided into seven sections. Section One focuses on building a knowledge base and applying it to patient care situations. Section Two presents common clinical situations. Section Three present clinical situations that you are asked to analyze and interpret. Section Four focuses on the development of management and leadership skills. Section Five provides additional test questions for practice for the NCLEX examination. Secion Six presents situations in order for you to practice the application of leadership and delegation skills. Section Seven provides a structure to use books and the Internet to research drub information.

This trusted resource combines the practical guidance students need to understand each phase of the nursing process with an emphasis on critical thinking, focusing on both independent and collaborative responsibilities facing today's nurses. Using straightforward language, abundant examples, and real case scenarios, the book addresses the nurse's role as a caregiver and decision-maker in a range of settings—from clinic to the home, community, research, and acute care arenas. A new focus and design help readers build essential critical thinking and problem solving skills and apply them within the nursing process framework. A companion Website provides a variety of tools such as patient self-assessment tool, clinical decision map, NCLEX� resources, and much more.

In today’s healthcare environment of scarce resources and challenges related to safety and quality, nurses must make decision after decision to ensure timely, accurate, and efficient provision of care. Solid decision-making, or lack thereof, can significantly affect patient care and outcomes. Clinical reasoning – how a nurse processes information and chooses what action to take – is a skill vital to nursing practice and split-second decisions. And yet, developing the clinical reasoning to make good decisions takes time, education, experience, patience, and reflection. Along the way, nurses can benefit from a successful, practical model that demystifies and advances clinical reasoning skills. In The Essentials of Clinical Reasoning for Nurses, authors RuthAnne Kuiper, Sandra O’Donnell, Daniel Pesut, and Stephanie Turrise provide a model that supports learning and teaching clinical reasoning, development of reflective and complex thinking, clinical supervision, and care planning through scenarios, diagnostic cues, case webs, and more.

What's behind every healed patient? Critical thinking! And what book best equips you to master the critical thinking skills needed for success on the NCLEX examination and in professional nursing practice? Alfaro's Critical Thinking, Clinical Reasoning, and Clinical Judgment, 6th Edition! With a motivational style and insightful "how-to" approach, this unique textbook draws upon real-life scenarios and evidence-based strategies as it guides you in learning to think critically in clinically meaningful ways. The new edition features a more streamlined, full-color design, and expanded coverage on some of key trends, including: interdisciplinary care teams, competency-based education, the IOM’s Leading Health Indicators, legal considerations, the effects of the Affordable Care Act, and much more. If you want to truly succeed in nursing practice today and be thinking-oriented rather than task-oriented, then look no further than this one-of-a-kind textbook. Simple approach and motivational writing style include vivid examples, memorable anecdotes, and real case scenarios to make content come alive. Practical strategies to promote critical thinking, clinical reasoning, and clinical judgment are incorporated along with supporting evidence as to why the strategies work. Focus on application (or "how to") and inclusion of supporting rationales (theory) make difficult concepts easy to learn. Critical thinking indicators feature evidence-based descriptions from the author of behaviors that promote critical thinking in nursing practice. Highlighted features and sections — such as Chapter at a Glance, Pre-Chapter Self-Tests, Guiding Principles, Critical Moments, Other Perspectives, Think-Pair-Share, Help Me Out cartoons, real-life clinical scenarios, key points, critical thinking exercises, and more — promote independent learning. UNIQUE! Brain-based learning principles utilize strategies that challenge the mind and are incorporated throughout the text. Timely coverage includes topical issues, such as: problem-focused versus outcome-focused thinking, prioritizing, developing a culture of safety, healthy work environments, expanding roles related to diagnosis and management, applying delegation principles, evidence-based practice, improving grades and passing tests the first time, NCLEX preparation, ensuring documentation reflects critical thinking, communication and interpersonal skills, strategies for common workplace challenges, and more. Inclusion of ethics- and standards-based professional practice reflects today’s professional climate which demands increasing accountability. Incorporation of cultural, spiritual, and lifespan content along with the nurse’s role in hospitals, communities, and long-term care settings presents a broad approach to critical thinking. Discussion of Tanner and Benner’s most recent work on what the research says about critical thinking and clinical judgment in nursing keeps readers up to date on the evidence-based side of practice. Coverage of IOM, QSEN, and other patient safety standards also keeps readers up to date on safe and effective nursing care.