Assignment: Reflective Practice

The aim of this reflective essay is to evaluate my professional development whilst undertaking the role of the Developing Intra-Operative Practitioner/ Advanced Scrub Practitioner (ASP). Using a reflective model I want to see how my new role affects me as an Operating Department Practitioner (ODP) and any legal implications it has for me as an employee.

Reflective practice is the process of thinking about and critically analysing your actions with the goal of changing and improving occupational practice.

Reflective practice allows us to reflect on our actions and experiences so that we can learn from them and adapt our behaviour accordingly. Reflective practice can be uncomfortable as it challenges our own assumptions about ourselves however it is vital for improving the quality of the service we provide.

Ans. Reflective practice is a way of learning from own experience to improve the way we work.

Experience is sometimes regarded as the best teacher. Many things can be learned in a classroom and by formal academic study, but many cannot. Reflective practice is a form approach to learning through experience. Reflective practice is a lifelong learning process to promote continual development of the nurse. Reflective writing practice helps the nurse to gain knowledge and to challenge their own ideas and concepts. The idea of reflective practice is not only to see what happened, but to see the situation through new eyes, eyes that can help in personal growth and to develop ways to respond differently in the future.

Gustaffson and Fagerberg point out that reflective practice has relevance for clinical practice as by understanding the contents of nurses’ reflections, it is also possible to understand the advantages of reflective practice and how and when such measures should be used by the nurses for further professional development.

It means that you stop and think about your practice; the process of reflecting on something you have done or a task you have undertaken. You may look at them from different points of view, you think about what went well, what went not so well and how you can improve it in the future.

making Practice-Based Learning work Reflection on PRACTICE A resource commissioned by the Making Practice Based Learning Work project, an educational development project funded through FDTL Phase 4 Project Number 174/02 and produced by staff from the University of Ulster. www.practicebasedlearning.org Author Patricia McClure School of Health Sciences, University of Ulster www.practicebasedlearning.org contents Reflection on Practice 02

The ability to become reflective in practice has become a necessary skill for health professionals. This is to ensure that health professionals are continuing with their daily learning and improving their practice. Reflective practice plays a big part in healthcare today and is becoming increasingly noticed.

Reflective practice engages practitioners in a continuous cycle of self-observation and self-evaluation in order to understand their own actions and the reactions they prompt in themselves and in learners (Brookfield, 1995; Thiel, 1999). Reflective practice is considered as an evolving concept which views learning as “an active process of reviewing an experience of practice in order to describe, analyse, evaluate and so inform learning about practice.” (Reid, B 1993 cited in Garfat, T. 2005).

Reflective practice in nursing is considered an important aspect to nursing. Durgahee ( 1997) defines reflective practice as a process of learning and teaching professional maturity through the critical analysis of experience, whilst John ( 2009) up to date explanation of reflection is learning through our everyday experience towards realising one vision of desirable practice as a lived reality.

Reflection is an everyday process and is very personal matter. Jasper (2003) suggests that reflection is one of the key ways in which we can learn from our experiences. Reflective practice can be defined as process of making sense of events, situations and actions that occur in the workplace (Oelofsen, 2012).

A load of research has been done on learning and reflective practice and its effectiveness on the practitioners and one of the first people to research reflective Practice was Donald Schon in his book “The Reflective Practitioner” in 1983. Schon was an influential writer on reflection and had two main ways of identifying reflection and they were reflection in action and reflection on action.

Within different disciplines, what is understood by reflective practice varies considerably (Fook et al, 2006). Despite this, some agreement has been achieved. In general, reflective practice is understood as the process of learning through and from experience towards gaining new insights of self and/or practice (Boud et al 1985;

Reflective practice, in this context, is not about just looking at myself in a mirror and accepting what I see blindly, without any question or evaluation. Rather, it is about looking at what I have learned and how I can utilise that learning in my teaching practice.