Professional Reasoning in Healthcare

A guide to decision-making and critical thinking in diverse healthcare practice contexts.

Professional reasoning is an essential component of health practice. To thrive in a world that demands constant change where there is not necessarily a right or wrong answer, strong frameworks are needed to support effective decision making. Critical to safe, ethical and culturally responsive practice decisions is the ability to integrate information from research evidence, the client, and the context/environment. Practitioners draw from these elements, along with the expertise of others, and through integration of the information with who they are, what they know, and how they operate. This creates a way forward that is right for the client, applicable to the context, and a good fit with themselves. This book provides such a framework.

Professional Reasoning in Healthcare: Navigating Uncertainty Using the Five Finger Framework aims to drive a revolution in professional decision-making and critical analysis among healthcare professionals. Built around an innovative framework for fostering thinking, this book illustrates the situated nature of learning and the uniqueness of practice decisions to individual practitioners and clients. The simplicity of the Five Finger framework belies the complexity of reasoning it stimulates. Written using narratives, the reader is able to imagine the situation as the thinking is made visible. It provides simple yet effective tools and techniques for promoting reflective and reflexive thinking and for integrating the evidence into effective decisions. It promises to help readers develop habits of critical thinking that lead to healthier, more effective decision-making processes.

Readers will find:

• Scenarios that bring the professional reasoning to life
• Tools and techniques to help translate theory into immediate practice
• Strategies to enhance reflective thinking skills, transformative learning, and sense-making
• Detailed discussion of topics including team culture, person-centred practice, social learning theory, cultural influences on reasoning, emotional intelligence, and more
• An overview of transdisciplinary thinking and a complexity-based view on ethics and values

Professional Reasoning in Healthcare is ideal for healthcare professionals, managers, students, and educators who are charged with developing skills in making critical decisions in diverse practice contexts.