Nursing Clinical Reasoning Cycle Case Study

Running head: NURSING CLINICAL REASONING CYCLE CASE STUDY
NURSING CLINICAL REASONING CYCLE CASE STUDY
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1NURSING CLINICAL REASONING CYCLE CASE STUDY
Introduction
As per Salminen et al. (2014), it is important for the healthcare professionals to manage
different complex healthcare situations with their ability to judge it and take a decision with their
critical thinking and reasoning ability to resolve it. The aim of this assignment is to describe one
such situation in which I applied my critical thinking ability to manage it. For this purpose, I will
be using the first seven stages of the clinical reasoning cycle by Levett-Jones et al. (2010).
Steps in Clinical reasoning cycle
Step 1: Consider the patient situation
As a registered nurse, I have developed my critical reasoning by experiencing several
critical situations that enhanced my ability to think according to the situation. In this case, the
patient Mrs. A was admitted to the hospital after a severe anxiety attack. While admitting her to
this healthcare facility her daughter revealed that she is a patient of diabetes and has mild
dementia. The situation that I first noticed is that the patient was unable to understand the
instructions and the interventions. I assumed that the patient is unwilling to respond to my
instructions and hence, I decided to talk to her daughter to collect further information.
Step 2: Collect Cues/Information
In the first step of the collection of information, it collects the patient's current available
information such as the handover report, electronic medical reports, social and medical history,
community preference and so on. Further, in the second step, nurses try to collect information,
which is responsible for patient’s current situation and as per the last step uses its knowledge to
provide a reason to the current patient situation (Delany & Golding, 2014). In this case, I

2NURSING CLINICAL REASONING CYCLE CASE STUDY
reviewed the patient’s medical history and found that she was she was previously admitted to
another healthcare; however, she was discharged only after 2 days due to cultural incompetence.
Further, I checked her handover data and found she has high blood pressure (140/90), high blood
glucose level 135mg/dl and average urine output was 40mL/hr. I also communicated with her
daughter and came to know that their family follows the Greek traditions and due to this, she
always used community care facility for her mother's treatment for dementia as well as diabetic
condition. The night her mother had a major anxiety attack, she was given a diet, which is
against the Greek culinary tradition and hence was admitted to the healthcare facility nearby. I
recalled that cultural incompetency could be the reason of serious stress and anxiety attack the
patient faced the night she admitted to this hospital.
Step 3: Process information
In this step, the collected cues are arranged so that a cluster of a meaningful clinical
pattern is created and the aberration in the patient situation is identified (Piantadosi, 2017). My
previous experiences as a registered nurse helped me to collect the pieces and arrange them with
reference to my previous similar experiences. I found that the patient's BP was high due to the
anxiety attack, further due to the history of cultural incompetency she was suffering from
hypertension. However, I was more concerned about her inability to communicate, as she was
unable to take part in medical intervention process that was affecting her health. While her
community care process, she had to suffer from cultural incompetency as her trusted community
care nurse provided her with a diet which is against her cultural preferences. Hence, I inferred
that the communication between her and I was affected due to her inability to trust upon the
healthcare facility and the interventions applied by me to improve her health condition. The
alternative reason can be her inability to understand the communication language as her daughter