Self Reflection in Nursing: Importance of Soft Skills and Critical Thinking

Self-Reflection

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................2
WHAT..............................................................................................................................................2
SO WHAT.......................................................................................................................................2
NOW WHAT...................................................................................................................................3
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................3
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................4

INTRODUCTION
Self-reflection and a strong sense of inquiry are essential for every professional nurse
practitioner. Self-reflection permits individuals or nurses to examine their own professional skills
and practices, including clinical actions, and compare them by having current best practices and
practical standards. After witnessing the negative aspects and events, it is essential to examine
the suitable opportunities regarding the improvement in professional actions. Regarding this, for
identifying the overall skills and their appropriate strengths and weaknesses, Driscoll’s model of
reflection is performed as it is interlinked with the right questions and stages about an
individual's experience and learning cycle.
WHAT
As a nursing staff, I need several skills and for that soft skills are important as these are the
personal attributes that are important to achieve success in the working environment considering
the nursing staff. Along with this, the hard skills of nursing staff are also crucial to perform
practical tasks like medication, wound care, insertion. Still, most clinical expertise prefers soft
skills, which is vital for success (Denis-Larocque et al., 2017). For that case, the current
healthcare services have sicker patients, several transfers among the units, shorter lengths of stay,
which speaks to the need for effective communication among all the care providers. In that case,
it also has a limited number of skills and is also weak in nature like decision-making and
leadership as these are the skills that are useful when working with colleagues and dealing with
patients. For that case, it has been identified that I am pretty weak in critical thinking skills, and I
need to improve that skill in terms of achieving growth and success in my career for personality
development.
SO WHAT
Due to the lack of these skills, I cannot deal with my patients as they were unhappy with my
behaviour and skills and wanted them to discharge them as soon as possible. Because of the
shortage of skills, sometimes I feel frustrated and rushed as I have a lot of work to be done, and
the depletion of skills can become a barrier to my overall performance. I also understand the
perspective of my patients as they have so my issues with my behavior and need to wait for so
long for their appointment due to my short time management skills (Bjerkvik and Hilli, 2019). I
think that my overall explanation was pretty much good, and the patient sometimes seems happy