Assignment: Practice Development

Task 1: Critical Incident Reflection

Reflection plays a very pivotal role in the lives of all practitioners. It is because the reflections help them in analysing their skills and helps the focus on their feelings (Woods, 1998, pp.44-46). The types of practice vary according to the profession and thus help us in identifying our roles and responsibilities which will ultimately leads a practitioner to become competent.

An incident took place in which I observed that a 24 year old lady was admitted in a hospital, and her vaginal examination was performed. Within a period of few hours, she was taken to the delivery suite where a midwife and a student were given the responsibility to take care of the young lady. At this point, the lady was coping well with her situation. Four hours later, as per the hospital policies a further vaginal examination was carried out by the nurse. She did not take any informed consent before the examination. The patient was in stress and depression that leads her to lose control. Her condition becomes such worst the midwife in charge takes her to bed for delivery. The nurse failed to make any formal recording of the last two vaginal examinations.

The negative feelings were experienced while making an observation of this situation and that provides the rationale for including this incident. The midwife in charge failed to properly communicate with the patient on her health issue. She did not even consulted with the other two care takers on the spot. This shows that the nurse was having ineffective communication skills.

The informed practitioner has a requirement of being self-aware and must possess the capability of understanding the reflective tools so as to increase the awareness of personality type, and learning and thinking styles. All these element s provide a substantial impact on the working of the practitioner in the workplace.

A critical incident reflection helps a person to pause and ascertain the events that have happened in order to give some meaning to them. Critical incident as a mean of reflection involves behaviour identification that is relevant to a given situation (Hannigan, 2001, pp.278-283). In the context of nursing, as mentioned above the critical incident might take a form of a medication error. The event I labelled as critical incident because it serves as an encouragement for nurses and students to provide reflection on what has happened. If, the sources of the critical incidents are properly identified it might help to raise an opportunity that leads to the raise of the educational profile and the skills required to deal with the issue in a workplace (Perry, 1997, pp.131-137).

Learning the cognitive and responsive elements is very important for the practitioner and its distinction is important for effective practice. A number of tools are available to make a practitioner gain an understanding of the different personality types. Emotional capabilities draw on a different area of mind. Cognitive capabilities help in fitting new data and information in the existing association ...