Critical Reflection in Adult Nursing Practice

What is Your Marker Looking for?

This assignment is designed to assess your ability to critically reflect on an incident from adult nursing practice / case study or from the scenario in the skills labs within the module. We want to see an appropriate reflection model being used to critically explore how decisions were made in complex situations. We are especially interested in what you learnt from the situation and how you address any gaps in knowledge and/or skills.

What is Your Marker Looking for?

What we are looking for in your assignment is based on operational indicators of the reflection process.

Reviewing the situation

The ability to describe an event/situation adequately.

The ability to identify essential elements and to describe own thoughts and feelings.

The ability to ask searching questions.

The ability to answer searching questions and being aware of the frames of references in use.

Reflective outcome

The ability to draw conclusions.

The ability to describe concrete learning goals and plans for future action.

Links to module intended learning outcomes

LO2 Coordinate and lead effective interventions when caring for patients with complex needs across a range of care settings in adult nursing.

LO3 Critically reflect upon clinical decision making in managing complex situations in clinical practice in adult nursing.

What do we mean by critical refection?

A critical reflection is a process of identifying, questioning, and assessing our deeply-held assumptions – about our knowledge, the way we perceive events and issues, our beliefs, feelings, actions and ultimately our practice. When we reflect critically, we use course material (lectures, readings, discussions, etc.) and best practice guidance to examine our biases, compare theories with current actions, search for causes/triggers, and identify problems at their core.

Critical reflection is not a reading assignment, a descriptive summary of an incident, or an emotional outlet, rather, the goal is to change and update our understanding as part of continuing professional development e.g. a person shows signs of Covid 19 and you need to make a number of clinical and non-clinical decisions, for many people this will be the first time that they may have come across the situation.  By critical reflecting on this incident they may wish to change certain aspects if the incident was to happen again.  We see this change to Covid 19 interventions within practice, often shaped by critical reflection.

For a reflection to be critical, it needs to move from just describing what happened, to:

·What did you learn?

·Were there any gaps in knowledge or behaviour?

·How did you evaluate your intervention or skill?

·Anything you would like to know more about?  

·What are you going to do to gain this knowledge?

·Were you aware of all the referrals and MDT support available etc.?