2 Critical Thinking and Evidence-Based Practice 29
an unquenchable spirit of inquiry to bring the best evidence to bear on their
practice, thus making their patient care safer and more cost effective and produc-
ing better patient outcomes.
Valid clinical questions arise during the course of the nurse’s day-to-day patient
care activities. These questions form the basis of many EBP projects and benefit
from the combined critical thinking of collaborative teams of nurses and their
interprofessional colleagues. As Scheffer and Rubenfeld (2006) eloquently stated,
“Putting the critical thinking dimensions into the development of evidence-based
practice competency demonstrates how critical thinking can be taken out of the
toolbox and used in the real world” (p. 195).
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