Clinical reasoning in nursing/midwifery education and nursing practice

We aim to gain insight in nursing/midwife students and registered nurses/midwifes understanding of clinical reasoning across various EU countries. We will describe the various teaching models for nursing/midwife students across EU countries and exchange good practices. University colleges are committed to the education of nurses/midwifes who are being adequately prepared to work in complex and challenging clinical environments (Levett-Jones et al., 2010). Nursing/midwifery education increasingly invests in teaching students effective clinical reasoning skills. The importance of teaching clinical reasoning are multidimensional but include the difficulties beginning nurses encounter when differentiating between a clinical problem that needs immediate attention and one that is less acute (del Bueno, 1994); and a tendency to make errors in time sensitive situations where there is a large amount of complex data to process (O‟Neill, 1994). Despite the importance of developing and subsequently measuring clinical reasoning skills, little is known about the reasoning skills of nurses/midwifes.
Furthermore there seems to be a gap between the clinical reasoning framework used by experienced nurses and nursing students. We therefore aim to close this gap between experienced nurses/midwifes understanding of clinical reasoning and nursing/midwifes students understanding of clinical reasoning.