Introduction:

Complex and changing healthcare settings, with greater need for patient-centered care and evidence-based practice, are factors that contribute with emphasizing critical thinking, as a competence inherent in nursing as a profession.

Objective:

To identify critical thinking skills for the process of diagnostic reasoning in Nursing students.

Methods:

Descriptive cross-sectional study carried out with 120 students from the Technological School in Camagüey Municipality who were in theirsecond academic year of the Bachelor of Sciences in Nursing, in the regular full-time course during 2017-2018. A follow-up was carried out on the progress of critical thinking skills, in the assessment and formulation of diagnosis, using a methodology of the nursing care process in clinical practice.

Results:

We identified difficulties related to the elaboration of reliable observations, distinction and validation between relevant and irrelevant data, finding patterns and relationships between signals or signs, making inferences and interrupting judgments due to lack of data to correctly formulate nursing diagnoses.

Conclusions:

The identification of critical thinking skills in correspondence with the link between assessment and diagnostic reasoning, in the practical context of the nursing care process, made it possible to specify characteristics related to its application in students of the Bachelor of Sciences in Nursing, during the stage of transition from academic training to practice in clinical practice.

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