Approaches and Barriers to Cultivating Critical Thinking Skills for Effective Clinical Decision Making

Clinical decision-making is a complex process that involves gathering information, analyzing data, making informed judgments, and taking appropriate actions for a patient's care. Critical thinking (CT) is a vital component of this process, as it enables healthcare professionals to evaluate information, identify biases and assumptions, and make informed decisions (1). It requires careful consideration of multiple factors, including the patient's age, gender, medical history, physical exams, and diagnostic test results, health status, lifestyle, and even preferences, to develop a diagnosis and treatment plan. In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of promoting CT skills in medical education, especially with explosion of medical information