Development Strategies in Medical Education

Introduction: Citical thinking & decision making skills are a requirement for nurses to be safe, competent and skillful practitioners and suggest these are essential to true autonomy and as the hallmark of the effective nursing care.

Methods: This was a semi experimental study conducted on a randomly-selected experimental and control group, in 2011. The participants were 51 senior nursing students from Shiraz nursing and midwifery school. Pre and post tests were applied. The data was gathered using a questionnaire involving demographic information along with California Critical Thinking Scale. The critical thinking scores of the two groups were assessed before, right after and two months after the study.

Findings: The findings presented the statistically significant differences of the experimental group in terms of analysis (<0.001), deduction (<0.001), inductive reasoning (<0.001) and the general score (<0.001) compared with the control group. In fact, the participants who received decision-making-skill training got a higher grad for their critical thinking ability.     

Conclusion: The decision making training would be a structured training program for the nursing students in order to improve their critical thinking.