Promoting Patient Phronesis

Promoting critical thinking in health care: phronesis and criticality.

This paper explores the notion of 'expert' health care practitioner in the context of critical thinking and health care education where scientific rather than philosophical inquiry has been the dominant mode of thought. A number of factors have forced a reappraisal in this respect: the challenge brought about by the identification of complex ethical issues in clinical situations; medicine's 'so...

Phronesis, Artifacts and Leadership Practice

This paper develops Aristotle’s idea of phronesis, or practical wisdom, as a framework to access, represent and communicate the complexity of successful instructional leadership practice in schools. The design and use of artifacts, the tools leaders develop and implement in their practice, provide a window into the patterns of problem-setting and problem-solving that guide the expression of phr...

Medicine as practical wisdom (phronesis)

Modern medicine faces fundamental challenges that various approaches to the philosophy of medicine have tried to address. One of these approaches is based on the ancient concept of phronesis. This paper investigates whether this concept can be used as a moral basis for the challenges facing modern medicine and, in particular, analyses phronesis as it is applied in the works of Pellegrino and Th...

Promoting Patient-centered Outcomes

In 2004, a 551-bed nonprofit hospital launched a pilot of the unit-based clinical nurse leader (CNL) role to support staff nurses and their patients. Thus far, the role has demonstrated great promise in promoting individual patient-centered outcomes, although the pilot has identified potential adaptations to enhance aggregate outcomes. These include decreasing the patient-to-CNL ratio, increasi...

Promoting Patient Safety (Acrobat PDF)