The Importance Of Reflection In Nursing Practice

Teaching critical thinking to students is an essential tool to give the students a solid foundation when they are entering the workplace. Nurse educators are called upon to teach the student the fundamentals of nursing. Critical thinking by one definition is the ability to analyze and process the analysis in order make informed decisions while caring for the patient. The purpose of this paper is to review some of the literature in order to help decipher what critical thinking is all about and to take a look at the importance and potential ways in which to teach critical thinking to nursing students,

Nursing is a most trusted and gratifying profession. As a nurse educator, I will express my passion for teaching by incorporating features such as clinical assessments, practical application of theory, evaluation, and role modeling into advanced nursing practice, from previous experiences and current experience and clinical practicum to find success and gratification in students chosen profession as well empowering leaners to develop their own strengths, beliefs, and personal attributes to become a good professional. Personally, I do have a positive attitude towards the personal and professional growth, and value ongoing learning and will stive to instill the same into my students learnig journey ..

The following reflection piece is based on an event which I experienced during my internship placement. Johns model of reflection will be used for this assignment. The reflection is based around my own personal experience with a terminally ill patient. It focuses on one main issue, providing hope for patients and how I felt about it. it also discusses my feelings, the knowledge I had, my knowledge gaps and what I learnt through literature during my reflection. This assignment also covers the importance of hope for patients and the role hope plays in terminally ill patients. I will also discuss ways in which health professionals can foster hope in terminally ill patients.

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.

In order to posit one’s personal philosophy he or she must have a clear understanding regarding self and the specific area (Nursing). The Cambridge Online Dictionary (2016) defined personal as “ relating or belonging to a single or particular person rather than to a group or an organization”. Doheny et al. (1997) defined philosophy as “beliefs of a person or group of persons and reveals underlying values and attitude regarding an area (as cited in Masters, 2017). Maville and Huerta (2013) state that Fawcett’s metaparadigm is often used to define and delineate the scope of nursing. Masters stated the purpose of one’s personal philosophy is to define how he or she finds truth. As a result each individual philosophy purported will be unique. This paper will seek to define, describe and explain my thoughts, feelings and belief regarding the four concepts of nursing metaparadigm and their interrelationship as well as their influence on my current nursing practice.

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

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).

Nursing in the past was more habituated and ritualistic than rational and precision. Nurses were not encouraged to question their practice let alone reflective practice. In early 1970s nursing started to move away from routines and rituals towards research-based practice (James and Clarke 1994). Reflection is a broad and complex process (Kenzi-Sampson 2005) therefore there is not a set single definition (Jarvis 1992). According to Reid (1993, p.305) reflection can be defined as a “process of reviewing an experience of practice to describe, analyze, evaluate and so inform learning about practice”. The question is why do we need reflective practice. This essay will try to

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.