Page 17 - Nursing Education in Malaysia
P. 17
Chapter 3
the Status of Nursing
in Malaysia
Four major areas are seen as affecting the status of nursing in Malaysia: nursing education,
nursing practice, nursing research and nursing autonomy.
NurSINg EDuCatIoN
Basic requirements of Nursing Education
To become a nurse, requires a significant amount of formal education. Globally, it is
agreed that nursing education is important to practice and that education needs to respond
to changes in healthcare created by scientific and technological advances. It is also agreed
that the core competency of nursing is critical thinking and application of knowledge into
practice. Nurses are responsible for making accurate and appropriate clinical decisions and
that clinical decision making separates profesional nurses from technical nurses. It is the
professional nurse, for example, who takes immediate action when a patient’s condition
worsens, who decides if a patient is having complications that call for notification of a
physician (or other healthcare provider), or who decides a teaching plan needs revision,
etc. Clinical decision making is seen as “judgment that includes critical and reflective
thinking and action and application of scientific and practical logic” (Benner, 1984).
Critical thinking, in itself, requires not only cognitive skills, but also a person’s habit
of asking questions, to remain well-informed, to be honest in facing biasness and to always
be willing to reconsider and think clearly about issues. There are core critical thinking
skills that, when applied to nursing, show the complex nature of clinical decision making.
The core critical thinking skills include: interpretation, analysis, inferences, evaluation,
explanation and self-regulation. Being able to apply all of these skills takes practice and a
sound knowledge base. By this definition, critical thinking can only be effectively done by a
profesional nurse. In the US, the American Nurses’ Association defines professional nurses
as those who graduate from a four-year degree programme (Potter and Perry, 2009).
