Nurses’ critical thinking and clinical decision-making abilities are correlated with the quality of nursing handover

Abstract

Critical thinking skills are instrumental for nurses to address patients complex situations and needs to ensure continuity of care. It's aimed to identify the relationship between nurses critical thinking and clinical decision-making abilities with the quality of nursing handover. A cross-sectional, descriptive correlational study was conducted with 205 nurses. Simple random sampling was used for participant recruitment. Data were collected by a questionnaire analyzed using Pearson's correlation test. In this study, nurses had good critical thinking, clinical decision-making abilities and handover quality. There is a strong relationship between critical thinking and clinical decision-making and the quality of nursing handover (p = 0.001; r = 0.384; r = 0.247). This study confirms the relationships of nurses critical thinking and clinical decision-making abilities with the quality of nursing handover. Education level appears to have the largest influence, the results imply a need for nurses to have higher education.