Post-Surgical Nursing with Clinical Reasoning

Running head: POST-SURGICAL NURSING WITH CLINICAL REASONING
Post-Surgical Nursing with Clinical Reasoning
Name of the student
Name of the university
Author note

1POST-SURGICAL NURSING WITH CLINICAL REASONING
Introduction
The term clinical reasoning is used to determine a cognitive process that guides the
practice of nurses and other clinicians. Clinical reasoning determines the way patient
information is collected in a clinical case, processed, integrated with the clinician’s
knowledge and experience, and ultimately comes to an understanding of the issue which is
used to diagnose and manage the patient’s problem (Kriewaldt & Turnidge, 2013). The
nurses then plan and implement interventions, evaluate patient outcomes, and finally reflect
and learn from the whole procedure. Thus, in preparation for clinical reasoning, nursing
students must be provided with opportunities to reflect on and question their assumptions and
prejudices; as failure to do so may negatively impact their clinical reasoning ability and
consequently patient outcomes (Mariani et al, 2013). The following essay will describe the
way of utilizing a clinical reasoning model to handle a clinical issue. Clinical reasoning
model of Levett-Jones, 2018, is used as a framework to plan and evaluate a case of person-
centred care.

2POST-SURGICAL NURSING WITH CLINICAL REASONING
Discussion
Fig. 1: Diagram of Clinical Reasoning Cycle
While clinical reasoning can be broken down into multiple steps, in reality the phases
merge (Kable et al, 2013). Since clinical reasoning is a dynamic procedure, nurses and
clinicians often combine two or more phases or even move back and forth until they get
engaged in a moral reasoning. Clinical reasoning must arise from this engaged, concerned
stance, always in relation to a particular patient and situation.
Patient situation
The patient, Ms Melody King, is a 36 year old woman who has been admitted to the
Emergency department, because she had 2-3 days of severe right lower quadrant (RLQ)
abdominal pain due to peritonitis, followed by ruptured appendix. She had to go through an
immediate laproscopic surgery to remove the ruptured appendix.