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.
