Purpose of Reflection in Health and Social Care Practise

Becoming a
Professional and
Reflective Practitioner

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................1
P1) Purpose of Reflection in Health and Social Care Practise...............................................1
P2) Description of Models and Tools Used for Reflection in Health and Social Care Practise. 1
P3) Use of Practise Themes to Underpin Reflection in Learning and Practise......................2
P4) Link Between Practise Themes and Other Performance Indicators................................3
P5) Methods Used to Gain Evidence of Effective Reflective Practise in Own Area of Work
Practise...................................................................................................................................3
P6) Portfolio of Evidence of Reflection Using Practise Themes as Framework...................4
P7) Improvements made in Personal and Professional Development by Reflection.............5
P8) Producing Targets for the Development of Own Professional Career Pathway..............5
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................6
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................7

INTRODUCTION
Health and Social Care can be defined as the practise in which those services are included
which are provided by the health care practitioners to service users (Bager-Charleson, 2018). The
following assignment will make its focus on purpose of reflection by using models of reflection
in health and social care along with the impact of personal as well as professional development
of any person. The focus will also be made on Practise Themes which is used to underpin
reflection in learning and practise, link between Practise Themes and other indicators. Further,
the explanation of methods used to gain evidence of reflective area, portfolio of reflection using
Practise Themes, reviewing own portfolio and the production of targets for the development of
own professional career pathway.
MAIN BODY
P1) Purpose of Reflection in Health and Social Care Practise
Reflection refers to the process by which an individual comes to know about his own
strengths and weaknesses in relation to a specific area. It provides an individual with the chance
to make their self-evaluation so that they could deliver better services in their own area of
specification. So the description of purposes of reflection in health and social care practise is
provided as under:
Increase in Experiences: It is among one of the main purpose of Health and Social Care which
makes an individual to use his/her past experiences in order to take decisions in future and to
make it safer and brighter. With increased experience, the quality of services will also improve.
Provide new Ways of Working: By making comparison in between past and present, it will be
possible for health care practitioners to develop new ways of working on the basis of findings,
weaknesses and strengths to provide with better services to users (Gale and Molla, 2017). It will
be possible to know for an individual to know about their own areas of strengths and weaknesses
so that they could work on strengthening the strengths and reducing the weaknesses of an
individual.
Understanding own values and attitudes: Through reflecting what an individual has done, it
will prove helpful in identifying the attitude and values, because it plays major role in giving out
a desired performance. This would help in turning negative value into positive, that requires to
work professionally in healthcare and other association.
1

Recognise the importance to work in a team: By recognising the importance of working a
team-member, a person can contributes more efforts in accomplishment of a task, in set period of
time.
P2) Description of Models and Tools Used for Reflection in Health and Social Care Practise
There are different models and tools which are used for the purpose of reflection such as
Gibbs Reflection Cycle, Atkins and Murphy, Johns Model of Reflection and many other models
could be used for preparing reflections. But with the help of Gibbs Reflection Cycle, it will be
possible to do more deep analysis about the concept, strengths and weaknesses of an individual.
There are different tools which are used in order to make the reflection. These are index cards,
sticky notes, journals/notebooks, handouts/forms and students' heads that are used in order to
make effective reflection. With the help of this reflection cycle, it will be possible to explore
more about own self qualities and dis qualities and the reasons behind good performance and
even bad performance (Hanson and Appleby, 2016). This model is being applied in case of
health and social care at the time providing health care services to the users with the help of
which improvements could be made in the health and well being of an individual. As such, a
health care practitioner could know about his feelings which he came across at the time of
providing health care services to their patients. In addition to this, it will also be possible for him
to know about his own strengths and weaknesses at the time of providing services to their users.
This will help the health care practitioner in order to know about the possible improvements to
be made in the ways of delivering services to their patients. In this way, the following model of
reflection will help health care practitioners in improving their performances.
Gibbs Model of Reflection
Description: This is an account of the care which I provided to an elderly person
admitted into the hospital as he was suffering from a prolonged and serious disease. I decided
that I will keep the patient calm by talking to them in the initial phase.
Feelings: I went through a rush of feelings while doing the care . I felt nervous as he was
an elderly person, then I felt excited as I wanted to perform the care effectively so that the life of
patient could be successfully saved. However, after the execution of care , the patient died and I
felt guilty for not being able to save his life.
Evaluation: I evaluated that the whole experience consisted of positive and negative
things. The positive thing was that I learnt new things about care and gained knowledge about
2