ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how critical thinking skills can be useful in cancer and palliative care education and practice and investigates why developing critical thinking skills is important for health professionals. It examines ways of introducing critical thinking skills into the curriculum and deals with some examples of learning and teaching strategies. There is general agreement that critical thinking skills are necessary for practitioners practising in complex setting such as cancer and palliative care. In the healthcare literature, there are a number of definitions of critical thinking. Developing critical thinking skills in students continues to be a goal of higher education programmes, and there appear to be sound arguments to support this for pre- and post-registration healthcare students. For more senior students in health-related courses and particularly for post-registration students, the need to separate subject learning from learning skills in critical thinking is less obvious.
