Reflective Practice: Improving Health and Social Care Services

This essay examines the significance of reflective practice within the health and social care sector, highlighting its role in enhancing service quality and fostering personal and professional development among healthcare practitioners. It discusses the purpose of reflection, emphasizing its ability to bridge the gap between theory and practice, stimulate continuous improvement, and cultivate self-awareness. The essay explores how reflection connects knowledge with practical experience, develops practitioner skills, identifies personal strengths and weaknesses, and promotes self-directed learning. Furthermore, it references established reflective models such as Kolb’s experiential learning model and Gibbs' reflective cycle, illustrating how these frameworks can be applied to systematically review, analyze, and evaluate experiences, leading to improved practices and behavioral changes. The conclusion underscores that regular self-review and learning from experiences are crucial for healthcare professionals to identify and address their weaknesses, ultimately enabling them to perform more effectively. Desklib provides access to similar solved assignments and resources for students.

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Table of contents
Introduction
Purpose of reflection
Role of Reflection on Health and social care practice
Influence of own reflection on personal and professional
development
Models used for reflection
Kolb’s reflective model
Gibbs reflective cycle
Conclusion
References

Introduction
Reflective practice is considered to be a way of evaluating one’s
own experience and learn from mistakes in order to improve the
way work is actually performed. The current presentation is
about purpose and role of reflection in improving the health and
social care practices for providing better services along with
personal and professional development of practitioner.

Purpose of reflection
The main purpose of implementing reflection practices
within health and social care is that it support in
preparing a health care practitioner for the world of
work and encourage them to develop a habit of
evaluating the actions or event for determining the
consequences. So that future actions can be improved
while avoiding these consequences.

Role of Reflection on Health and
social care practice
• The main role of reflection within health and social
care are mentioned below:
• Close the gap between the theory and practices.
• Enhance the quality of healthcare services
• Stimulate personal and professional development

Influence of own reflection on
personal and professional development
• Connect knowledge and experience: The reflection
is consider to be a method through which the
theoretical knowledge that a practitioner gain can be
connected with the practice it perform while working.
• Develop practitioner skills: - By adopting the
process of reflection, nurses/practitioners become able
to get aware of themselves in term of practices they
perform, which further support in reviewing and
improving their clinical skills.

Continue…
• Idea on personal strength and weakness: - The
reflection of own experience supports the healthcare
practitioner in determining the strength and
weaknesses they hold
• Self-directed learning: The reflection practice
develops a kind of self-awareness among the
healthcare practitioner as they reflect over their
working experience which support their learning.

Models used for reflection
There are several models that are consider to be effective
for performing reflection practice such as,
–Kolb’s reflective model,
–Gibbs reflective cycle

Kolb’s reflective model,
Kolb’s reflective model, also known as experiential learning
which is based on own experience where health care
practitioners can review, analyze and evaluate
systematically that results into new experience.

Gibbs reflective cycle
Gibbs reflective cycle, encourages people to think in
systematic manner about the experience for a particular
situation, make them aware about own actions and suggest
for change in behavior.

Conclusion
From the above performed study it can be said that
reflection practice plays a significant role within the
healthcare sector as it supports the practitioner to
develop their knowledge through self-awareness by
regularly reviewing their actions and learn from them.
It supports them to identify their weaknesses which
they can improve to perform more effectively.

References
Snowdon, K., 2018. Humour in reflective
practice. Journal of Paramedic Practice, 10(4), pp.144-
146.
Waltz, C., 2019. Impact of Reflective Practice within a
Residency Program on New Graduate Nurse
Satisfaction, Stress, Support, and Retention Rates.
Khatijah, L.A., 2015. The effect of reflective journal
writing on the academic performance of nursing
students.