BARCELONA

Nurse in charge: Esperanza Zuriguel Pérez

Entity/Agency in charge: Hospital Universitari Vall d’Hebron.

Description

BACKGROUND

A higher need of patient-centered health care and a practice based on evidence are the factors that emphasize the critical thinking as a professional competence. At a theoretical level, Alfaro-LeFevre presented a model of critical thinking with four components (personal characteristics, intellectual abilities, interpersonal and self-management abilities and technical abilities); however, no tools for its empirical evaluation have been found.

METHODOLOGY

Correlational and psychometrical descriptive study. A set of items was generated and a panel of experts evaluated the content validity of the new tool. After that, the validation was performed on a sample of 339 nursing professionals from the Hospital Vall d’Hebron (Barcelona), selected through stratified sampling with proportional allocation of its units, between March and April of 2015.

RESULTS

The index of content validity of the Questionnaire of Evaluation of the Critical Thinking in the Nursing Practice (QuCTNP) was 0.85. The total Cronbach alfa value  was 0.96. The coefficient of intra-class correlation was 0.77. The factorial confirmatory analysis showed that the resulting model was in line with the suggested four-dimension theoretical model. It was observed that assistance nurses displayed moderate levels of critical thinking. Among other remarkable results, statistically significant differences were found (p < .001) between the critical thinking ability levels and factors such as age, years of professional experience, health care unit, years of experience within the same health care unit, working shift, type of work contract and academic level.

CONCLUSIONS

Critical thinking is related to certain socio-demographic and professional variables. The psychometric properties of the QuCTNP support its usefulness in the clinical field and in future research.

The documentation below is only available in Spanish