Systems Thinking in Advanced Nursing Practice
Systems thinking is a holistic approach to problem-solving and analysis that focuses on how individual constituents interact with each other within the larger system to form a process and achieve the overall system’s goals. It is simply the process or the ability to establish how individual parts influence each other and the impact of their interaction on the outcomes. The concept has been widely used in management and other operations across many sectors, including agriculture, politics, and education. In nursing, the concept has been acknowledged since the days of Florence Nightingale, who established the connection between nursing practice and patient outcomes.
Today, nurses’ work is not measured in isolation but rather in conjunction with other departments that make up the hospital system. These departments must work closely together to provide quality and effective patient care. For a nurse to provide the best care, he/she must understand how the entire hospital system operates and how different units impact patient care.
Just like clinical skills, systems thinking is also critical in nursing. In recent years, system thinking skills have become a critical component in nursing education, particularly for nurses looking to indulge in advanced practice. Nurses in advanced practice are required to make advanced medical decisions in the healthcare environment dynamics. Some of these decisions are used to develop policies used to improve healthcare and achieve a positive patient outcome. Systems thinking enables advanced nursing practitioners to focus on the entire patient considering all ongoing medical services that the patient is exposed to. It also entails identifying changes that need to be made and how these changes will impact different medical units and the hospital system as a whole.
Some key systems thinking abilities required in advanced nursing practice include;
• Interpreting. It is the ability to understand information or a particular medical incidence.
• Analyzing. To analyze is to examine and interpret a particular course of action in detail. Health is a sensitive issue, and the ability to analyze can be critical when making major decisions.
• Evaluating. A nurse with good evaluating skills is able to assess a piece of information and determine whether it is valuable, relevant, and credible. Assessment in nursing is mainly used to establish whether outcomes have been fully achieved.
Systems thinking prevents errors that can result in incorrect clinical actions that can be fatal. Advanced nursing practitioners need systems thinking skills to reason holistically, comprehend, and make complex decisions focused on bettering the patient’s health and improving patient outcomes.

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