Reflective Report: Personal and Professional Development as HCA

This reflective report details a senior healthcare assistant's (HCA) journey in enhancing communication skills within a dementia and end-of-life care setting. The report outlines the HCA's training experiences, including mentorship from a registered nurse and participation in question-and-answer sessions. It highlights the implementation of meditation practices for improving self-coping skills and resilience. The HCA also discusses efforts to refine culturally competent care plans by learning additional languages and seeking feedback from patients. The report evaluates the effectiveness of these actions, referencing relevant literature, and reflects on the use of a personal development plan (PDP) to achieve both short-term and long-term goals. The HCA emphasizes the importance of hands-on training, on-the-job experience, and self-assessment in improving communication skills and overall professional development, including ethical considerations and the management of patient care.

Running head: REFLECTIVE REPORT
Reflective Report
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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REFLECTIVE REPORT
2.3 According to Whiffin et al. (2018), healthcare assistant (HCA) works in the
hospital of community settings, under the guidance of qualified healthcare professionals.
HCA are popularly known as nursing assistants, auxiliary nurses or nursing auxiliaries. I
work as a senior healthcare assistant at the Charlotte House-Isleworth UK. I work with
dementia patient and end of life care patient. As per my understanding, my main skill as an
efficient HCA is to execute proper communication skills. Effective communication skills in
healthcare include both verbal and non-verbal communication skills. Under non-verbal
communication skills there are maintenance of proper body language, eye contact and active
listening to the queries and concern of the patients (Pazar, Demiralp and Erer 2017). Thus in
order to monitor my progress in the domain of developing effective communication skill, first
attended training under the supervision of trained registered nurse who have 5 years of
experience in healthcare. I learnt the skills of verbal and non-verbal communication.
However, my mentor old me I need to learn it by observing liv experiences and thus I assisted
her in patient interaction that helped me gain real time exposure. After one month of training,
I made slight change my plan and took part in a questions and answers round coming
randomly from my colleagues or team mates. This helped me to improve my skill in
answering random queries of patients and their family members politely. In order to evaluate
my effective communication skill, I will provide oration in the front of my team mates or
colleagues and will indulge in live question answer sessions after the end of each oration.
This will help to test my active listening and stating my own thoughts in a clear and in a
concise manner. However, apart from taking hand on training from these experts, However,
while attaining training on resilience and on compassion fatigue, I practice meditation 30
minutes just after the bed time. Meditation after the bed-time helped me in improving the
self-coping skill and tenacity of withstanding workplace pressure. This can be regarded as
one change in plan that what discussed in the PDP. After I week of meditation I increased the

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time up to 1 hour of medication. I captured my overall emotional progress by taking help of a
mental healthcare professional who accessed my level of patience based of any predefined
parameters and the compared the same with the baseline data and found significant
improvements. Additionally I also attained training in language other than English like native
language of the aboriginal people so that I can be capable enough to refine the culturally
competence care plan into a patient centred one. However, I am still lagging behind in
understanding the accent of the indigenous population. Going forward I would plan to
conduct a training under transcultural nurse to improve the communication skills in colloquial
language of Australia. I would also like to add that in order to track my overall progress over
my long terms and short term and middle term goals, I never compensate my duty hours and
my accountability towards the patients. I think my fairness and accountability towards work
will help me to excel in my goals. In order to increase my knowledge about accidental fall or
pain management I took feedbacks from my patients only in order to track my progress and
found that I knowledge still lags behind. This is reason why I am planning to attain training
under an occupational therapists.
2.4 The overall actions taken for skill development are effective. According to
O’Regan et al. (2016) under the healthcare domain it is important to attain hands on training
from the tenured of experienced health care professionals under the healthcare set-up.
Chiocchio, Rabbat and Lebel (2015) are of the opinion that on-job training under live setup
along with lived experiences of the trainers helps to improve the overall provision of the
training process. I think on-job training under experienced individual worked for me in
improving my communication skills. Pazar, Demiralp and Erer (2017) stated that healthcare
communication with the team-mates differ largely from the patients. Thus I focused mostly
on communicating with patients under the presence of my mentor and observing live
scenarios. These goals of step by step communication skill improvement through training,

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observation and reading books helped me in polishing my interpersonal communication
skills. I also observed the strategies and the style of communication in the palliative care unit,
Attaining training under live setup further helped me to improve my observational skills.
Improvement in observational will facilitated further learning under health and social care
setup. It helped me to excel effective management of the ethical dilemmas. Improvement in
the observational skills for a health and social care staff will help in faster identification of
the clinical priority of the patient. My action of conducting self-assessment through reflective
practice also helped me in achieving my personal gals faster as self-assessment is unbiased
and helps to get a detailed perspective of the gaps in practice and how well I am performing.
O’Regan et al. (2016) stated that a health as well as a social care worker must have a
detailed knowledge regarding effective management of the pain and accidental fall among the
older adults along with knowledge regarding engaging the older adults in social activities.
Such knowledge is highly effective under the community based healthcare settings. However,
I thought taking feedbacks from patient will help me to improve my knowledge of effective
management of accidental fall, but it failed to do so. I think attending training under
occupational therapists will help me to understand the underlying mechanism of fall
prevention and thus helping me to excel.
My eagerness to learn more and to remain update always about the current trend in
practice helped me to achieve my goal of communication skill improvement and to attain
excel in my professionals. Moreover taking feedbacks or being open to feedbacks across all
sectors of the healthcare organisation helped in improving the skills further, being open to
feedbacks helped me to withstand the criticism in the workplace. At last I would like to say

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that making the PDP template helped me to stay focused on my goal and at the same time
achieve my goals in set wise manner. This helped in ordered progress in skill improvement.

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References
Chiocchio, F., Rabbat, F. and Lebel, P., 2015. Multi‐level efficacy evidence of a combined
interprofessional collaboration and project management training program for healthcare
project teams. Project Management Journal, 46(4), pp.20-34.
O’Regan, S., Molloy, E., Watterson, L. and Nestel, D., 2016. Observer roles that optimise
learning in healthcare simulation education: a systematic review. Advances in
Simulation, 1(1), p.4.
Pazar, B., Demiralp, M. and Erer, İ., 2017. The communication skills and the empathic
tendency levels of nursing students: A cross-sectional study. Contemporary nurse, 53(3),
pp.368-377.
Whiffin, C.J., Baker, D., Henshaw, L., Nichols, J.J. and Pyer, M., 2018. “Am I a student or a
Healthcare Assistant?” A qualitative evaluation of a programme of prenursing care
experience. Journal of advanced nursing, 74(11), pp.2610-2621.