Critical thinking refers to the multidimensional skill or purposeful mental skills activity that acts as a guide to beliefs and actions. The nurses need this skill to incorporate their rich knowledge base into the specific client care issues they face. Creativity is an important aspect of critical thinking as it enhances development of new or improvements of existing concepts. Critical thinking incorporates skills such as critical analysis for determination of key information and ideas through Socratic questioning, inductive reasoning which involves generalization of observations, deductive reasoning, which is reasoning into specifics, and concepts which is ideas or views as applicable to the real world. It also incorporates explanation to justify interventions in addressing a client’s problem, evaluation to determine whether actions bore the required outcomes and self-regulation to examine the provided care and adjust interventions as necessary.

Critical thinkers have attitudes such as independence of thought, fair-mindedness that refers to the flexibility to new ideas, insight into egocentricity and sociocentricity, and intellectual courage where they examine their own ideas fairly. Further, they foster integrity, which involves the application of same standards of proof to others as to oneself, perseverance where they seek solutions in spite of difficulties and frustrations, confidence in reason to arrive at trustworthy conclusions, interests in exploring thoughts and feelings and curiosity.

Nurses can develop critical thinking attitudes and skills through understanding themselves and their manner of thinking. This can be achieved by self-assessment to determine the attitudes they possess, their strengths and weaknesses; being tolerant to dissonance and ambiguity, where they admit to what they do not know, seeking of situations where good thinking is emphasized and practiced and creating their own environments the support critical thinking. Standards such as clarity, accuracy, relevance, precision, completeness among others, and elements such as points of view, purpose of thinking, information, assumptions, implications among others can be used as a check for critical thinking.

Nursing process is astep-by-step, rational approach to planning and provision of nursing care to individuals. It involves phases such as assessing and diagnosing the client, planning, implementing and evaluation. The importance of critical thinking in nursing practice cannot be overemphasized. The problem faced by every client is unique and, therefore, require own set of interventions to remedy. Every phase of the nursing process involve procedures that hugely rely on the application of critical thinking and more so where less-than- routine procedures or ideas are required. These situations are mainly setting priorities, situation analysis, change or conflict resolutions among others.

The nursing practice requires such skills as problem solving. In this phase, nurses obtain information clarifying the nature of the problem and suggest possible solutions. Further, they evaluate the solutions and choose the best approach for implementation. Approaches such as trial and error, application of intuition, the research process and the scientific method are available for a nurse to choose. The second skill is decision making. This requires choosing of the best course of actions achieve the desired objectives. There is a sequential approach to decision making, which involve the following steps in order: identifying the purpose, setting the criteria where one defines the desired outcome, factors to be preserved and to be avoided, weighing of then criteria, seeking of alternatives, examination of the alternatives, projecting the future, implementation and finally, evaluation of outcomes.

As in critical thinking, creativity plays a major role in nursing practice. It enhances the rapid creation of ideas by nurses, flexibility and creation of original solutions to the problem, which are essential to nursing practice.