CRITICAL THINKING IN MENTAL HEALTH

CRITICAL THINKING IN MENTAL HEALTH Introduction My curriculum proposal is to incorporate critical thinking skills into NURS 420 by using standardized patient simulations. I have been a nurse for more than 15 years, a ...

CRITICAL THINKING IN MENTAL HEALTH Introduction My curriculum proposal is to incorporate critical thinking skills into NURS 420 by using standardized patient simulations. I have been a nurse for more than 15 years, and I worked as a medical assistant in a family practice office for 20 years before becoming a nurse. In my experience and dealing with new nursing students, we do not get enough experience with mental health patients. One of the many reasons is there is not enough mental health facilities to allow all nursing students the clinical time needed. Students are anxious when taking care of a mental health disorder, and don’t know how to properly assess that patient. Therefore, we don’t know how to use our critical thinking skills to assess them or even know what might be coming next. As an intensive care nurse and emergency room nurse, mental health patients of some sort come under your care on a daily basis, and we need to know how to assess them and not be scared. My proposal will show a way to incorporate critical thinking skills while learning to assess a patient using standardized patient simulations. Literature Review After I decided on my curriculum gap, I found 10-15 articles that would help students learn critical thinking and how we can incorporate the need for standardized patient simulations to learn critical thinking skills. The first article “The Correlation of Critical Thinking Disposition and Approaches to Learning among Baccalaureate Nursing Students,” discusses how critical thinking is a judgement that can help one decide how to solve and deal with problems. Critical thinking is a way we think that allows us to question assumptions. Critical thinking allows us to decide whether a claim is true or false, or even partly true. The authors concluded that critical thinking can be obtained through the use of stimulation of students in deeper thinking. (Eisa, Kabeel, 2016.) The next article “Concept Mapping as a Teaching Tool on Critical Thinking Skills 3 CRITICAL THINKING IN MENTAL HEALTH and Academic Performance of Diploma Nursing Students,” looks at research that supports their views on concept mapping and adding this to the development of critical thinking. Findings of this article suggest that lessons need to move more toward simulations and active learning styles with less memorization. (Latif, Mohamed, Dahlan, 2016.) The next article “Preceptors’ and nursing students’ experiences of peer learning in a psychiatric context,” evaluates students and preceptors. The authors took several students and preceptors and evaluated how they felt about mental health nursing after doing clinicals with mental health nursing. It was an evaluation of if they developed any more critical thinking skills after doing the clinicals. The findings were conclusive that having a peer in that field helped with the clinical experience. Preceptors definitely promoted the learning process for nursing students. This study was relevant to my paper because simulations like preceptors can also help foster critical thinking skills. (Vuckovic, Karlsson, & Sunnqvist, 2019.) The next article, “The impact of an educational intervention on nursing students critical thinking skills,” focused on identifying and improving competence of critical thinking skills in nursing students. This study did a pre and post assessment prior to and educational intervention and it was conclusive that it led to improvement in every critical thinking skill except speaking and listening skills. (Lopez, Jimenex, et.al, 2020.) Like the previous article the article, “Comparing the effects of traditional lecture and flipped classroom on nursing students’ critical thinking disposition,” gave pre and post assessments. They divided the class in half and gave an exam prior to either attending the traditional lecture or flipped class. A questionnaire and a critical thinking disposition inventory were given to both groups, it was proven that a flipped classroom increased the students critical thinking disposition. (Dehg