Reflective Practice

Introduction:

Reflection its self is looking into personal thoughts and actions. For nurses this would mean looking at how they performed a particular task taking into consideration their interaction with their colleagues and other members of staff, patients and in some cases relatives This then enables the nurse to assess their actions and thought processes. There are various frameworks of reflection that one could choose and the examples used for this work is by Gibbs (1988), Johns (2000) and Benner (1982) Gibbs: Gibbs reflective cycle encourages one to think in order about the different areas of an experience. It is presented in a number of questions that the reflective practitioner …show more content…

Her idea is about helping to develop new knowledge and to ensure current knowledge is valid. The way Benner thinks this framework develops is based on experience and with differing experience come different ways of reflection. Benners book “From Novice to Expert” describes 5 levels of nursing experience and with each level comes a different way of reflection. The stages are: Novice Advanced beginner Competent Proficient Expert At the start of one’s nursing career Benner says that the novice would just do as they are told to a greater extent as they have little or no knowledge to fall back on or previous experience. By the time the nurse reaches expert they will be able to rely on their accumulation of knowledge and because of all their experience they will be able to deal with situations with intuition as well as knowledge. The way a novice would reflect as far as Benner is concerned would be to look at situations with a negative eye. They would also be negative about themselves and their ability to move forward changing things for the better. An expert would be in a position to look at both positives and negatives. They would also be able to look at how they could make things work better and the things that worked well in the first place. Benners book (Novice to Expert) puts into words what nurses had already known about their practice but had problems explaining it. Benner, C.A Tanner,