Dakota Melland
The Christ College of Nursing and Health Sciences
Abstract The purpose of this paper is to explain how the skill of reflection affects nursing students in the clinical setting. Different reflection examples and how they affect nursing practice will be discussed. A nursing reflective study from 2007 will also be explained to give a better understanding of how reflection enhances nursing student’s educations during clinical decision making. Introduction Reflection is defined as “active, purposeful thought applied to an experience to understand the meaning of that experience for the individual” (Ashby, 2006, paragraph 3). In simpler terms reflection can be defined …show more content…
One of the most common is modeling. This allows the individual to look at and understand the situation from many different views as opposed to seeing it from one person’s view. This helps to understand why people react the way they do in each situation. For example, if a patient goes into cardiac arrest and the patient’s nurse runs into his or her room to start chest compressions, a different nurse grabs the crash cart, and a third nurse sprints down the hallway to get a rolling computer. Upon reflection through modeling each nurse, in this situation, will get the chance to more fully understand why the other two nurses did what they did during the critical situation. The third nurse will now have the chance to understand that maybe he or she should’ve gone into the patient’s room to attempt to help the first nurse instead of running to get the computer. The other two nurses would get to understand that the third nurse went to get the computer to be sure everything was documented correctly, but in reality this was not the best decision in this …show more content…
When students retain knowledge from the classroom and use it during clinical they are able to reflect on each situation with a better understanding of why everyone did what they did. Medical terms can act as barriers to anyone new in the medical field. Students must also use reflection in the classroom. When reflection is used in the classroom a better medical terminology understanding is learned and remembered. This helps in the clinical decision making process as well. If the students are able to retain the knowledge they learned in the classroom, they can relate to situations in clinical more, which makes it easier to make decisions based on current