Professional Experience Placement

This blog is a about the clinical reasoning cycle taken from a blog originally posted in April 2012. The rationale for the re-posting is to raise awareness to clinical supervisors and students that it is a useful framework to use during professional experience placement or work-integrated learning.

The School of Nursing and Midwifery (SNM) currently uses a number of models to assist students to learn about critical thinking and the process of reflection.  While many of the current text books discuss the nursing process, in 2012 the SNM introduced the use of the Clinical Reasoning Cycle developed by the Universities of Newcastle and Western Sydney through an OTC grant. This model builds on previous models and demonstrates the process of critical thinking and responses is not a linear process and is conceptualised diagrammatically as a circle or a spiral of linked and on going clinical encounters.

Levett-Jones et al (2009) described clinical reasoning “as a process by which nurses collect cues, process the information, come to an understanding of a patient problem or situation, plan and implement interventions, evaluate outcomes, and reflect on, and learn from the process”. The authors describe the five rights of effective clinical reasoning.  These are the right cues, action, patient, time and reason.

Professional experience facilitators may find it useful to find out more about the clinical reasoning cycle as students will be using it to assist with critical thinking / decision-making during PEP. More information can be found on the University of Newcastle Clinical Reasoning webpages. Further reading can be found via the publications page. There are later blogs that also refer to clinical reasoning resources. You can search for them using the categories or tags for this blog.

If you have any comments or suggestions you are welcome to post them here, alternatively you can contact Carey.Mather@utas.edu.au.