Rita Payan Carreira

Advancing Clinical Excellence: Nurturing Critical Thinking Skills in Medical Education

Critical Thinking Skills in Medical Education 
Rita Payan Carreira
University of Évora / CIEP-UE, Évora,  
Portugal
 
   

 
Critical thinking skills (CrT) are crucial for effective clinical decision-making, problem-solving, and patient care in all healthcare professions. Medical schools are increasingly emphasizing the development of critical thinking skills alongside medical knowledge. Many schools have integrated critical thinking train-ing into their medical curricula across various stages of medical education. The strategies used may present different pedagogy types, whether they are intended to be used within a course (e.g., problem-or case-based learning, simulation-based learning, interprofessional education, and other active learning strategies) or they represent mandatory training in clinical settings (e.g., pre-clinical coursework, clinical rotations). 
However, integrating critical thinking and clinical reasoning development in medical education pre-sents several challenges. Some are related to the implementation of CrT nurturing activities (time con-straints, assessment methods, faculty training, interdisciplinary collaboration), and others are related to the institutional culture, priorities, and resource constraints. Besides, to ensure the efficacy of the implement-ed strategies, student's prior knowledge must be guaranteed, and the evaluation of the activities' outcomes must prove its effectiveness.  
This presentation explores learning strategies to enhance critical thinking in medical education, as-sessing their effectiveness and potential long-term impact on students' CrT development. 

Keywords: critical thinking; clinical reasoning; medical education; curriculum development; teaching strategies; educational innovation 
Biography    
Rita Payan-Carreira is a Full Professor at the University of Évora (Portugal), Department of Vet-erinary Medicine since June 2018. With a teaching career of nearly 35 years, she has been actively engaged in pre-clinical and clinical courses in the Veterinary Medicine Master Programme. Rita's dedication to enhancing her students' clinical reasoning skills prompted her to explore critical thinking. She specifically concentrated on pedagogical interventions that cultivate critical think-ing skills and dispositions, integrating these elements into the core content of her courses. She participated in two ERASMUS + Projects – Crithinkedu and Think4jobs, gaining valuable insights and advancements in pedagogy. Find out more at https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5225-4510