Your Nursing Survival Guide

THE ART OF REFLECTIVE PRACTICE Callum Mitchell Berry - Elsevier Ambassador I might be the biggest advocate for writing you'll ever meet. I have enjoyed writing for as long as I can remember; I find my ability to express myself through the written word so much clearer than with speech. What's more, the overbearing perfectionist in me loves being able to edit things before they enter the world. So what follows probably has an inherent bias but I’d like you to read it anyway, because I think it carries some merit. In this article, I'm writing about writing, or more specifically, reflective practice. As you get further into your nursing study, you'll hear the term "reflective practice" being tossed around. To boil it down, reflective practice is essentially the act of writing about your experiences and reflecting on how you felt and acted, and what you could do better next time. It is particularly pertinent to healthcare professionals, whom often have to think and make decisions with great speed, leaving little time to analyse what they do and why they do it. intensive physiology classes, applying clinical manifestations to the body. It is not the case study on the patient presenting with COPD and pneumonia undergoing respiratory alkalosis due to her hyperventilation. It is not learning to recognise a ventricular fibrillation on an ECG or undertake a mental health assessment. Within our nursing training, it tends to be considered a soft skill. It is not the

One of the things I’ve found of most value about reflective practice is how much it helps me to clarify and understand my strengths and weaknesses. This is paramount to the work of a nurse. No one should be put at risk because we fail to identify where we fall short, or because we don’t know when to ask for help. If I can write down, in clear words, that I have weaknesses that I must address, those weaknesses become tangible to me and are at the forefront of my mind when I am confronted with them again. In short, by knowing my enemy, I am able to develop an effective battle-plan. Given the nature of our work, the act of reflection has the added benefit of being cathartic. Nurses, like many healthcare professionals, are confronted every day with the stark brutalities of life and death. Holding the burden of caring for people during what is often the worst time of their lives, is a difficult task—and while I don’t think that writing about one’s experiences is the silver bullet against the stress and anxiety that can creep into our lives all too readily, being able to step back from our experiences and analyse them can help us get out of our own heads. Self-expression is a priceless tool. It is too often the case, that those of us working in health forget to look after ourselves. There are a number of models for reflective practice, all with varying methods and levels of depth: Gibbs, Kolb, Borton. I implore you to go out and find one that works for you. My call to arms is this: go out and write down your experiences and dissect them. Perform surgery on your actions: pull them apart and stitch them back together, and know that in the future, they will be better.

But it is valuable nonetheless.

While we as nurses need this vast reserve of specialised knowledge and skills to know how to best care for our patients, our analysis of what we have learnt is imperative in the safe use and honing of that knowledge.

8 4

Our knowledge is yours

2