How Nursing Students Can Be Empowered by Reflective Practice
Reflection is essential for anybody who wants to improve. Nurses and other medical professionals are no exceptions; in fact, reflection is rather required in their field as any kinds of mistakes on their part might end up in painful of outright deadly consequences for the patients. Not to overdramatize the subject, but health care recipients do trust doctors with their lives as they expect them to provide proper medical services.
Reflection on the Readings
Nurse practitioners need to think fast and make decisions on the go. They often cannot afford to avoid a difficult situation, thinking it over, and coming back with the answer later. The multitude of different issues to consider such as the ethical principles, the demanding workloads, the politically complex environments, etc. do not ease things up either. A nurse should implement a significant amount of concentration in clinical situations every day; i.e. he or she directs the majority of his or her mental power to these situations, which is very straining for the psyche and the overall physical condition of the nurse.
Reflective practice helps cultivate a lot of knowledge needed in the medical profession. Often it gives the practitioner a chance to learn from his or her mistakes before they are even made. Via concentrating on personal experiences, one can reflect on his or her actions, thoughts, and modes of behavior, structure them and point out the weak links. By understanding what action or pattern of thinking lead to what results, a practitioner may correct, improve or expand the scope of his or her professional decision-making abilities.
If there is an uncertain or conflicting situation, the practitioner makes use of reflective practice to analyze and review it: he or she figures out what the source of the conflict or uncertainty is, what the desired result is, and what possible choices are available to the nurse practitioner.
The unexpected nature of the situation is the best trigger of reflection. Any person tends to remember and think over the events that surprise him or her; the possibility of which he or she could not predict. If the nurse gets into a situation that he or she has not expected to happen, his or her mind will anchor it and mark it as something worth remembering. The fact that something unusual has happened sends a signal to the brain that indicates that there is a new experience a person can come into a contact with. It might be dangerous, it might be useful, it might not have any effect on the person’s life at all – unless at least one of these possibilities is confirmed, a person’s mind will be kept in the state of uncertainty and will try to avoid dealing with the situation further; delay it until it knows how to classify it. This is when reflective practice steps in. A nurse practitioner has to be effective at understanding numerous situations he or she has never encountered before. He or she …
