Nursing Reflective Analysis

Reflective practice is vitally important within healthcare as it equips workers with the tools to learn from personal experiences, whether good or bad. Healthcare professionals are then empowered to develop their professional skills and become more effective and thoughtful workers. Reflective practice enables workers in this field to become far more effective practitioners by reviewing, analysing and improving their performances within their personal work

Reflecting on the past seven weeks I have acquired countless knowledge, which I will use to further strengthen my profession as an Advanced Practice Nurse. The course allowed me to think beyond my current practice knowledge and acquired innovative ways to evaluate the situation at hand. The learning objective in program outcome four helps set standards that I will use to guide my clinical practice to meet various healthcare needs. Using the case studies has helped to further enhance my knowledge on disease physiological state, using differential diagnosis, disease manifestations, and clinical presentation. It has also taught me the skills on how to differentiate between similar diagnoses to properly identify the problem and treat the patients.

Brunero & Stein-Parbury (2008) discussed the effects of clinical supervision in nursing staff and argued that self-reflection generates a sense of self-awareness and knowledge to the individual. Supervisees or students may be asked what happened during a clinical event, how they felt, the implications of their actions and what they would do differently if faced with the same situation. This provides the supervisee with ‘time-out’ to examine the interactions between their practice, personality

Tanner (2006), had introduce the term ‘thinking like a nurse’. When I read this article I was wondering what it means and takes to think like a nurse, I am a nurse by profession and yet I don’t even know what it means. In order to be a professional nurse, nurses are required to learn to think like a nurse. To my surprise, to be able think like a nurse, a nurse got to clearly defined and understands what is critical thinking and clinical reasoning. Both terms are powerful terms and these terms explain the mental processes nurses use to make certain that they are doing their most excellent thinking and decision making for their patient’s better outcomes.

Florence nightingale pioneered the practice known as reflection-on-practice, this is a tool that is needed in developing improvement and knowledge to enable an individual to grow in their nursing profession. Nightingale wrote “the very elements of nursing are all but unknown” through this statement she implied that nurses word be learning for the rest of their career (journals.lww, 2017).

Driscoll (2000) model) consists of three stages (What, So what & Now what) completing one cycle help me to improve my caring practice continuously and learning from those experience for better practice in the future. The cycle starts with a description of the situation (“What”), which include analysis of the incident. “So what” evaluate the experience, including the analysis to make sense of the experience, and the final stage “Now what” is a conclusion of what else could I have done better and an action plan to prepare for, if the similar situation arose again. Baird and winter (2005) gave some reasons why reflection is required in the reflective practice. They highlighted that a reflection could generate the practical knowledge, help to adapt

These two models can be interlinked to enable the student to explore his/her thoughts are feelings without making assumptions whilst creating learning opportunities to change future nursing practice. Due to having two different models of reflection, where Johns (2000) reflective model does not permit the practitioner to delve into their thoughts and feelings, Driscoll (2000) model of reflection enables them to do so to achieve different learning outcomes (Jasper, 2013).

The professional nursing values I believe are things you can be taught and some you cannot. Nurses are special individuals who ultimately want to care for and help others as much as they can. I agree with all of these values and believe some I will need to work on myself such as competence, illness prevention and patient education. Others I believe I have based on my experience I have already had while caring for others. Some of the qualities I believe I have include: caring, compassion, dependability, empathy, focusing on the patient- defining quality of life, having a holistic patient centered care, kindness, openness to learning, respect for others their dignity and worth and sensitivity. I am currently caring for a man with stage 4 prostate

Reflecting on this clinical practice has been unquestionably beneficial to me. It is helped me ascertain further information about dignity and the importance of it. It has also allowed me to evaluate the care I give and develop personally and professionally. Using the Gibbs (1988) reflective framework has enabled me to look at all aspects of the clinical practice and gain essential information relating the maintenance of dignity. I have found this assignment of reflecting extremely interesting and have enjoyed learning new things about myself and the care I give in clinical practice. It has given me more confidence in delivering care and enlightened me to always support patients as individuals. I have grasped a competent understanding of the benefits of reflecting on practice and will endeavour to reflect on all my practice placements in the

Upon reflecting on this experience, I feel like I am more confident in handling the situation should it arise again. Reflecting on it has made me realise that not everything I did was wrong and has helped me to explore what I need to improve on. Reflection is important in the nursing profession as it allows us to think about our actions and talk about how we could have carried them out differently (Johns and Burnie, 2013). Reflection plays a big role in developing the student into a nurse (Barbour,

Observation of the environment, the children and our own practice and feelings is at the heart of reflective practice. Observation requires a particular mindset and skill set.

Reflection is like looking in a mirror and describing what you see. It’s about thinking back to an experience and questioning what I did, and emotions that I felt during the experience, and then reflecting on a better and more sufficient way of doing it in the future (UNISON, 2016). Gibbs Reflective Cycle is the model that I have chosen to use while reflecting back on the module “Learning from service users and carers”, Gibbs believes that this module is useful for helping people learn from what that they experienced. He calls this “Learning by Doing” (Mind Tools, 2016).

Reflection is a part of daily process of learning and thinking. As stated by Jasper, (2003), the reflection is “…the way that we learn from an experience in order to understand and develop practice”. It is useful in dealing with challenges and can be used as a tool for personal and professional development. Moreover, a convoluted process of writing experiences and learning from any event and understanding of its usefulness in future is, defined as Reflective writing. The theoretical model which is often used as a framework for reflective writing was created by Professor Graham Gibbs (1988) and is known as Gibb’s reflective cycle. Gibbs’s reflective cycle has 6 phases.

This reflection is sought about through the use of reflective cycles, for example Gibbs (1988). Reflection enables the student to develop his or her own theories behind why an event occurred, this is also achieved by linking theory to practice in order to gain a deeper understanding (Levett C. 2010, Stonehouse D. 2011). For this practice placement portfolio the reflective cycle that I have chosen is The Reflective Cycle by Gibbs (See appendix one) (Gibbs 1988). Although it wasn’t made predominantly for reflection through nursing scenarios, as it was developed for educational purposes, it does give the student a cycle which can be used easily to analyse their event in a linear fashion. Although Gibbs reflective cycle is one which is mainly focused on the event itself, rather than the knowledge that can be sought from delving further into the reasoning behind an event, it does create a cycle which allows the individual to focus on their actions and the reasoning behind what they did. In doing this the individual can create their own theories behind the event and are able to develop a plan for the future if a similar event was to occur (Jasper M.

The Term reflection can have many meanings to many people. Reflection can carry meanings that range from the idea of professionals engaging in solitary introspection to that of engaging in deep meaningful conversations with others. But for this assignment I will focus on; what is refection in the clinical setting, why it is important for health care professionals to reflect and where the ideology of reflection came from. I will also provide a personal experience of reflection during my time in the clinical setting that helped me to come up with a solution to a challenging situation.