Teaching And Assessment Of A My First Year Student

Throughout personal professional development reflection is essential, allowing health care professionals to self-develop by revisiting events and analysing areas in which improvements and learning would ensure a positive impact on their future practice. The Nursing and Midwifery Council, (NMC, 2010) notes that all health care practitioners must be self-aware in their own values and principles which could affect their practice. Ensuring they maintain personal and professional development while learning through supervision, feedback and reflection.

Reflective practice is an important component of all nurse education programmes. The Nursing and Midwifery Council's (NMC) The Code: Standards of Conduct, Performance and Ethics for nurses and Midwives (NMC, 2008), states that nurses must continue to keep knowledge and skills up to date during

Burns, S. Bulman, C. Palmer, A. (1997) Reflective Practice in Nursing - The growth of the professional practitioner. London: Blackwell Science.

Reflection is a process of exploring and examining ourselves, our perspectives, attributes, experiences and actions / interactions. It helps us gain insight and see how to move forward (Nursing Times 2018). I believe reflection is particularly important when it comes to Nursing, as medicine is constantly changing/ improving and us ourselves medical professionals must adapt with the changes in medicine. I find that reflection is extremely useful in doing this as we can look over procedures or experiences that we have had, how that made us feel, whether we would change anything, then in the future we can see the changes that may have been made, whether this has changed our feelings and opinions on medical practice.

Reflection is defined by Howatson-Jones (2013), as “a way of examining your experience in order to look for the possibility of other explanations and alternative approaches to doing things” (p. 6). The practice of reflection is important for numerous reasons. As stated by Hargreaves and Page (2013), reflections promote good practice and in the occurrence of a difficult or challenging situation, they can help to identify where things went wrong and how to improve the outcome for future incidents. As identified by Jasper, Rosser and Mooney (2013), reflection offers benefits to both the patient and the practitioner. Practitioners are more likely to avoid routine practice, continuously develop their knowledge and identify faults to improve on. Patients are more likely to receive higher standards of safety and better quality of care

As the nurses who participated in a study (Jones & Cheek, 2003) overwhelmingly advised, there is no such thing as a typical day for a nurse. Nurses face new situations everyday and it is important that they can adjust their knowledge and skills accordingly. Critical thinking and reflection are essential skills because they can enhance nurses’ ability to solve problems and make sound decisions. Critical thinking skills enable nurses to identify multiple possibilities in clinical situations and alternatives to interventions; weigh the consequences of alternate actions; and make sound judgement and decisions (Brunt, 2005). Through reflection, nurses can examine their practice, explore feelings and reactions and connect new meanings to past experience (Brunt). Reflection can enhance self-awareness, foster professional satisfaction and growth and increase the possibility for change and improvement in nursing practice and therapeutic relationships (Thorne & Hayes, 1997).

According to page 150, during reflection, the nurse is able to identify what was helpful, required changing, or elimination during the care provided to the patient. The effectiveness of interventions, assessment accuracy, and timeliness of actions can be considered during reflection as well. However, discussion about resources that were used or needed are not a part of the reflective areas that the nurse should focus on.

Reflective practice is often defined as when practitioners engage in a continuous cycle of self observation and self evaluation in order to understand their own actions and reactions they prompt in themselves and in learners (Brookfield, 1995; Thiel, 1999). The goal is not necessarily to address a specific problem or question defined at the outset, as in practitioner research but to observe and refine practice in general on an ongoing basis. (Cunningham 2001). Reflection on practice is a key skill for nurses. Engaging in regular reflection allows practitioners to manage the personal and professional impact of addressing their patients’ fundamental health and wellbeing needs daily (Oelofsen, 2012)

Reflective Practice Introduction: Reflection its self is looking into personal thoughts and actions. For nurses this would mean looking at how they performed a particular task taking into consideration their interaction with their colleagues and other members of staff, patients and in some cases relatives This then enables the nurse to assess their actions and thought processes. There are various frameworks of reflection that one could choose and the examples used for this work is by Gibbs (1988), Johns (2000) and Benner (1982) Gibbs: Gibbs reflective cycle encourages one to think in order about the different areas of an experience. It is presented in a number of questions that the reflective practitioner

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.

In recent years, reflection and reflective practice have become well-known term with in the health care arena. They are words that have been debated and discussed with in the health care setting (Tony and Sue 2006). Reflective practice is essential for nurses, as nurses are responsible for providing care to the best of their ability to patients and their families (NMC, 2008). Reid (1993) states reflection is a process of reviewing an experience of practice in order to describe, analyse, evaluate and so inform learning about practice. Johns (1995) notes that reflection enables practitioners to assess, understand and learn through their experience. Reflective practice, therefore, offers nurses an opportunity to review their decisions and

Schon (1987) identified two types of reflection that could be applied in the nursing practice. He described “refection-on-action” that involves assessing and analyzing an action while performing the action and “reflection-in-action” which involves going back to previous actions and situations and analyzing them to gain new insights and to improve the nursing practice (Schon 1987). Schon further argued that for reflection to take place there should be a commitment to action as there is to results. Coined in 1970, Borton’s theory on the other hand, proposes the use of three stem questions in the reflective practice (Borton, 1970). These questions were originally proposed by John Driscoll who described the experiential learning cycle (Driscoll, 1994) where practitioners are able to learn from their experiences to improve their practice. According to Driscoll (1970) these trigger questions could be used to complete the experiential learning cycle leading to a practitioner gaining new information and insights on how to improve their practice (Driscoll, 1994). The importance of Driscoll’s three stem questions in improving practice reflection among nurses cannot be underestimated. By answering these stem questions, nurses develop a better insight into the situation regarding how and why it occurred and identifies the next courses of action in case the situation recurs.

Personal reflection in nursing is essential and critical as it allows for continuous development and re-assessment of skills whilst working within a health care setting (Reflective practice: a tool to enhance professional practice 2011, pp.1-3). Personal reflection is important as reflective practice allows for the ability for one to reflect and examine their actions and experiences which overall will increase and enhance their clinical knowledge, as well as developing and improving their practice (Reflective practice: a tool to

As higher standards expected are from the public and higher patient safety demands are expected from health boards, therefore, there is a need for a way of measuring standards of practice which can be achieved through active thinking in a clinical environment brought about by critical reflection (Rolfe, Jasper & Freshwater 2011). Reflection has become such a key component in the role of a nurse that the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) have seen it fit to include it in their professional code of conduct the Code: Professional Standards of Practice and Behaviour for Nurses and Midwives, hereafter referred to as the Code (Nursing & Midwifery Council [NMC], 2015). With reflection being a vital skill for nurses to continue their professional development (Parrish & Crookes, 2013), an analysis of what it means to reflect within nursing is needed by all who intend to enter the profession to ensure its effective use is applied.

The Royal College of Nursing defines reflection as the process of thinking deeply with the purpose of understanding (RCN 2013). Reflection is a way people recollect, think and evaluate their knowledge which is a vital part of learning. (Boud et al cited in Royal College of Nursing). Reflection allows us to be conscious of any form of discrimination. It enables learning from mistakes and prevents future occurrence (RCN 2013). In addition, Jasper et al (2013) looks at reflection as a way professionals learn through various experiences in their role. They also went further to say, for development to happen in our roles as professionals, there is the need for continuous process of building our knowledge.