I'm a critical thinker and no I don't carry a card ;-)

"One of us (PD) had a conversation recently with a new Director of Nursing (DoN) of a large hospital trust. They started to talk about “these new graduates today” and “what was wrong with them.” For shame, PD was just waiting for the usual tired diatribe about “university nurses” and what they “could not do” and why they were all “too academic” and so on ad nauseum. I could not have been more wrong. The DoN talked about “these new nurses” and how they did not seem to be critical thinkers who could question and challenge existing systems and practices. What I need, they said, are nurses who can advocate, challenge, step in to prevent incidents or patient deterioration, who can see better ways of doing things and make that happen. The last thing they need, they said, were nurses who could only tick boxes or follow algorithms and orders. To say this conversation was an eye-opening highlight in the oft-reported “decay” of critical thinking in nursing (Morrall & Goodman, 2013) was an understatement, especially since every university School of Nursing will swear blind that it produces nurses who are card-carrying “critical thinkers” and every hospital will testify that it encourages this, rather than erects barriers to prevent it (Cornell, Riordan, Townsend-Gervis, & Mobley, 2011). It is a real concern that so few Schools or health services even know how to ask the question, “How do we know?”, let alone answer it." p.2.

Darbyshire, P., Thompson, D. R., & Watson, R. (2019). Nursing schools: Dumbing down or reaching up? Journal of Nursing Management, 27(1), 1-3. https://doi.org/10.1111/jonm.12730

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