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Introduction to reflective practice

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“The unreflected life is not worth living” Plato

Reflective practice in the context of medicine is core to the service you deliver as professional obstetricians and gynaecologists. It is central to patients' safety, clinical governance, continuing professional development and revalidation.

Reflective practice is about critically examining your clinical experience and learning from it. It is about ensuring continued excellence in our practice both clinically and ethically. This both maintains and develops standards and enables advances in practice to be made.

Reflective practice goes beyond the expectations of the 'narrow language' of competency.

The Donaldson Report in 2002 on 'Building a Safer NHS' highlighted the risky nature of health care practice and the need to provide a culture of incident reporting to ensure patient safety within the NHS organisation. In the context of obstetrics and gynaecology, one of the specific areas targeted for action in the report was a 25% reduction in the number of instances of harm that resulted in litigation.

Reflective practice helps to minimise adverse events in your practice. It supports recognising when there is something 'not quite righ' in your professional clinical practice and helps to 'make sense of it'.

Professionals in practice can also contribute to harm reduction in the organisation by ensuring they keep up to date with their practice (continuing professional development). This can be achieved by increasing awareness of how to integrate theory with practice and how to learn effectively and efficiently from experience.

Reflective practice is about ensuring risk assessments and judgements about the care of patients are made safely and to a standard acceptable to the public as well as the profession. Professional reflective practice in a medical context involves doctors explicitly understanding how they work in order to make diagnoses and provide care to both individuals and populations.

This involves purposeful goal-oriented thinking, which also takes into account other influencing factors such as the complex, uncertain and sometimes ambiguous situations in which health care is delivered. It is also influenced by the expertise of the clinician. Developing reflective practices will enhance your fitness to practice.

This tutorial identifies what reflective practice is, how it is relevant to busy, professional clinicians, and shares frameworks for improving reflective practice. It also enables you to explore how reflective practice can support revalidation, continuing professional development and promote patient safety.

Learning objectives

When you have completed this tutorial you will be able to:

  • demonstrate a clear understanding of the meaning of reflective practice
  • recognise the central role reflective practice has in your professional care of patients
  • critically analyse patient safety issues using reflective practices
  • discuss reflective practice in the context of revalidation
  • utilise reflection for continuing professional development
  • identify a framework to use to promote your reflective practice
  • demonstrate an understanding of which tools can help develop your own reflective practice

Last updated: 26/01/10 (image of the Analysis of patient safety using reflection - Discussion replaced with a new, higher quality version)

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