Agency teaches staff to use critical thinking skills
It has become a common term in public schools these days, but how often do you really consider teaching your staff in ways that will improve their critical thinking skills?
Sometimes an education manager simply wants to test the staff's knowledge. But at other times, it's more important to know what they think about a subject, says Alice Benson, RN, BSN, education coordinator for Lafayette Home Hospital Home Health Care Agency in Lafayette, IN. The hospital-based agency serves eight counties in central Indiana.
Good housekeeping
For example, Benson wanted the agency's aides to think about how best to approach housekeeping tasks. "It's not one of the top 10 things people want to hear about, but I evaluate home health aides when they take the test," she explains. "And housekeeping is one area that I find the home health aides don't do the best on, so that's why I try to include it each year.
"I wanted them to think about a situation they had encountered regarding housekeeping and to go about answering a series of questions about what was good in that situation and what was bad, and how they could have done better," Benson says.
So she gave them a quiz on the topic they would have to return to her. (See Keeping the Client's Environment Clean Inservice Quiz, above right.) The quiz has no real scores, but the aides' answers can help determine whether a particular employee is having difficulty in an area. "I'll see if I think there's an aide who is having problems, such as being weak in infection control measures," she says. "Maybe the aide doesn't wear gloves when cleaning the toilet or when coming in contact with bodily fluids."
Benson also has used this educational approach with nurses. For instance, she wanted staff nurses to read an article on depression and think about their own patients, who may be depressed. Again, she wrote a critical thinking quiz on depression, which incorporated some of what they might have learned from an article on depression with what they have observed in their work with depressed patients. (See Depression Inservice Quiz, p. 98.)
The quiz might help nurses think about what is available in terms of community resources for depressed clients and how the agency might better help them, Benson says.
The whole idea of teaching staff to use their critical thinking skills, she explains, is to help them take time to examine open-ended questions that have no right or wrong answers.
[Editor's note: To contribute an idea to Tips from the Field, please contact Melinda Young, P.O. Box 1024, Tryon, NC 28782. Telephone: (704) 859-2066.]
You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
- Award-winning Medical Content
- Latest Advances & Development in Medicine
- Unbiased Content