The Essentials of Clinical Reasoning for Nurses: Using the Outcome-Present State Test Model for Reflective Practice

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.

RuthAnne Kuiper, PhD, RN, CNE, ANEF, is a Professor in the School of Nursing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Sandra M. O'Donnell, MSN, RN, CNE, has recently retired as a Lecturer in the School of Nursing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Daniel J. Pesut, PhD, RN, PMHCNS-BC, FAAN, is a Professor of Nursing in the Nursing Population Health and Systems Cooperative Unit of the University of Minnesota School of Nursing and Director of the Katharine J. Densford International Center for Nursing Leadership. Stephanie L. Turrise, PhD, RN, BC, APRN, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.