05/10/2026
Critical thinking. Clinical assessment. Clinical reasoning.
At HealthCare Training Service, we teach these as the three pillars of a good clinician.
A patient’s history provides important information—but it is not automatically the diagnosis. The monitor may show deterioration—but it does not necessarily reveal the cause. Algorithms and the 4 Hs and 4 Ts help prompt our thinking—but they cannot assess the patient for us.
The clinician must ask:
What could be causing this deterioration?
What does the patient’s clinical assessment actually show?
Why am I choosing this treatment, and what physiological problem will it correct?
History creates a hypothesis. Clinical assessment tests it. Clinical reasoning connects the findings to the correct treatment—and then evaluates whether that treatment worked.
This is the standard we embed throughout our ALS and PALS courses.
Treat the patient—not simply the monitor, the history or the algorithm.
