Background: In nursing education, essential skills include Critical Thinking (CT). There is scant evidence on how nurse educators could promote CT in students in a clinical context.
Objective: To analyse the level of CT and correlated variables in healthcare nurses overseeing the clinicals of nursing undergraduates.
Methods: The study population were all nurse educators for clinicals at hospitals with nursing undergraduates. To evaluate the CT skills of nurses the Nursing Critical Thinking in Clinical Practice Questionnaire (N-CT-4 practice) was administered. Frequencies, percentages and measures of central tendency and scatter were obtained. A bivariate analysis was performed to analyze the correlation between the nurse educators' CT level and the sociodemographic, professional and academic levels. The nonparametric Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests were used to compare two independent groups. Statistical significance was defined as P < .05.
Results: The total number of participants was 639. The highest mean CT level was seen in clinical nurses involved in undergraduate nursing instruction and with experience of up to 10 years (mean CT score = 372 (33.3), p = .007). Global CT levels were similar in women and men (mean CT score: 364 (31.9) in women and 358 (40.5) in men, p = .187), with statistically significant differences only observed in the intellectual and cognitive indicator (P = .022).
Conclusions: CT levels are high in teaching healthcare professionals in the clinical environment.
Keywords: Clinical reasoning; Education; Mentoring; Nursing; Nursing faculty practice; Thinking.
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