Students are required to reflect on three clinical situations they experienced related to their specific area of practice. Examples of clinical situations that student can reflect upon will include at least 3 themes from the following list (but not limited to): meeting the educational needs of the patients, families and significant others; functioning as a nurse in a multidisciplinary health care team; communication problems with colleagues/clients/clients’ families; clinical issues; or ethical dilemmas. Students need to identify their personal and professional parameters in a way they have handled the situation that evolved from their clinical practice, reflect on those aspects and identify the learning points. Students will use the Gibb’s reflective cycle as a framework for their reflection. Students must add some suggestions/recommendations at the end, resulting from analysing their reflections. Students will need to allocate time to reflect on their experiences in practice, explore their personal thoughts, feelings and emotions, focusing on positive and negative aspects of the experience.

Guidelines for reflective journaling

In this unit students are required to reflect on their learning experiences by adapting Gibb’s model of reflection to describe an event/issue/problem they have encountered in their specialty clinical practice.

1. Description: Explore the context of the event in a specialty area of an acute care setting and describes the event, where it happened and what actually occurred.
2. Feelings/emotions: Explore and describe your thoughts and feelings at the time of the event/issue/problem encountered.
3. Evaluation: Make your own judgement as a nurse, about the outcome of the event; to identify what went well and areas for improvement. Was the event resolved satisfactorily?. Self- examination and self-evaluation of the event/issue/problem encountered.
4. Analysis: Mraw on your critical thinking/analysis as a nurse to explore the situation at a deeper level and consider, why the event occurred, and if anything could have been implemented to prevent this event from happening.
5. Conclusion: Explore alternative actions that may be used to deal with similar situations to affect a more positive outcome.
6. Action Plan: Consider the event and to put in place a plan which, on implementation, would deal more effectively with similar future events. This could include further educational training/skills development.