Unit 4: Reflective practice

Given the nature of the Comfort Care Guide, reflection is a key element of this training; you can use it to gain both insight into your personal attributes and perspective on how you can improve your practice and future learning.

Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle

In this video, Professor Christine Brown Wilson takes you through completing the reflective process using Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle:

Engaging in the reflective process should help you to identify and alleviate any fears and anxieties you may have around conducting Family Care Conferences and discussing these sensitive topics with family carers.

If you are a registered health or social care professional you may like to record these reflections as part of a professional portfolio to demonstrate continuing professional development (we have provided links to the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s reflective accounts form template, which is part of a UK registered nurse’s revalidation portfolio, in the Resources section). In this example, we refer to Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle, but you might prefer to use a different model in your own practice. There are many models of reflection suited to nursing practice, such as:

• Butcher and Whysall’s REFLECT model
• Driscoll’s model of reflection (1994; 2000; 2007 - originally by Borton, 1970)
  ‘What’, ‘So What?’ and ‘Now What?’ matched to the stages of an experiential learning cycle with trigger questions
• Atkins and Murphy model (1994)

Tips on the reflective process

Dr Catherine Buckley outlines some top tips on engaging in the reflective process and how it can aid you as you implement your learning into practice:

Supporting colleagues

Once you are comfortable holding a Family Care Conference, you might like to support others in learning about this process. There are some key elements to think about when introducing a colleague to the Comfort Care Booklet and a Family Care Conference.

The following is an outline of a process that may be completed in one sitting or undertaken in smaller segments, depending on the time you have available. This process uses the information from Units 1–3 of this resource:

• Find a quiet space where you are not going to be interrupted
• Identify if your colleague has read the Comfort Care Booklet. You might like to ask the colleague to go through Unit 1 in advance of, or after, your meeting. You may wish to watch the opening videos together if they have not watched them ahead of meeting with you
• Answer any queries your colleague has about the content of the Comfort Care Booklet and the questions family carers might ask
• Ask your colleague to pretend you are a family carer and introduce the Comfort Care Booklet to you
• Provide some positive feedback and ask them how they felt about introducing the Comfort Care Booklet
• Introduce the ‘Advice and tips on using the booklet’ video at the end of Unit 1 (your colleague could watch this in their own time)
• Explain what a Family Care Conference is – you might like to refer to Unit 2 and watch the roleplay videos in Unit 3 as these show the process
• Answer any questions your colleague might have about the process
• Ask your colleague to pretend you are a family carer and to go through the process of a Family Care Conference with you
• Provide some positive feedback and ask them how they felt going through the process of a Family Care Conference
• Introduce the ‘Advice and ‘top tips’ for facilitating a Family Care Conference’ video at the end of Unit 2 (your colleague could watch this in their own time)
• nvite your colleague to work through Unit 3 and then meet a second time to discuss some of these scenarios and how they might deal with them
• Support your colleague by sitting in with them to observe their first Family Care Conference, and then provide supportive feedback at the end of the meeting

Positive and supportive working relationships with colleagues:

The following actions can help you to have supportive discussions with colleagues in situations where communication with family carers is difficult:

• LISTEN – identify the challenge/issue causing concern for your colleague
• EMPATHISE – acknowledge the challenge/issue your colleague is facing
• WHAT WENT WELL – identify the strengths your colleague is demonstrating
• COLLABORATE – collectively identify a new skill that would be helpful for your colleague
• REINFORCE – what went well and the effort being made by your colleague given the challenges/issues identified earlier

Unit 4 Quiz

Please answer the following questions to show how much you have learned from Unit 4: