critical thinking in public health

Critical thinking is crucial in public health due to the increasingly complex challenges faced by this field, including disease prevention, illness management, economic forces, and changes in the health system.

Three main conceptions of critical thinking were identified, each of which will be elaborated in greater detail below: biomedical critical thinking, humanist critical thinking, and social justice-oriented critical thinking.

Those of us concerned with fighting for improvements in health outcomes ought to rally behind these efforts. If teaching critical thinking can lead to better decision-making about health, we should start treating the teaching of critical thinking as an important public health initiative.

Critical thinking skills are essential to the development of well-trained healthcare professionals. These skills are not “taught” but must be “learned” by the student. The educator provides learning experiences through which the students can gain the needed skills and experience.

The key issue in learning health literacy is to develop knowledge, skills, motivation, and self-awareness that translate into individuals’ autonomy, independence, and empowerment. These qualities enable individuals to deal with health and its determinants.

Addressing public health researchers and practitioners, and social scientists who wish to work alongside those in public health, this chapter provides the reader with an orientation to the assemblage of values, theories, and practices that constitute a critical public health.

Given the shared interest in critical thinking with broader education, we also highlight why healthcare and education professionals and researchers need to work together to enable people to think critically about the health choices they make throughout life.

Critical health pedagogy (CHP) is a teaching philosophy that emphasizes the importance of critical thinking in the context of medical education. CHP takes a transformation-based approach that encourages students to critically examine how the social structures, power dynamics, and patterns of inequality affect the health outcome of individuals ...

In this study, we sought to map the multiple conceptions of critical thinking in circulation in health professional education to understand the relationships and tensions between them. Methods: We used an inductive, qualitative approach to explore conceptions of critical thinking with educators from four health professions: medicine, nursing ...

Our definition of CHL points to a different direction, namely critical reflection by individuals opposing highly normative ‘prescriptions’ and instead, critically thinking about health, its social conditions, and the manifold interests of those involved in its production and distribution.