Clinical Wisdom and Interventions in Critical Care: A Thinking-In-action Approach

by Patricia Benner

This insightful new resource examines how expert critical care nurses use scientific knowledge, professional experience, and a careful attention to each patient's changing condition to provide excellent nursing care. Based on descriptive interviews and observational studies of 205 nurses, it helps readers at all levels develop the critical thinking, reasoning, judgement, and intervention skills they need to become superior critical care nurses. Analyses how nurses anticipated, prevented, identified, and solved the clinical problems described in these case examples. Teaches the reader to perform multiple, simultaneous interventions -- for one or more patients -- by focusing on the most relevant findings and changes in each patient's condition. Demonstrates how ethical and clinical reasoning are linked and contributes a practice based perspective to the contemporary debate on biomedical ethics.

588 pages, Paperback

First published October 23, 1998