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Foisal Talukdar

Reflective Practice Pros and Cons

Reflective practice is about the process of thinking about your practice and taking personal responsibility for improving your professional skills. Reflection enables you to review the positive aspects of your own practice in order to build on your successes and to identify areas for improvement or further development.

What is Reflective practice : Reflective practice is the analysis of everyday working practices to improve practices and promote professional development. It involves critically analysing yours actions with the goal of improving yours professional practices.

Working in a professional manner needs a continuous process of reflection, which involves looking at your practices, ideas and actions, then evaluating their effectiveness in order to make improvements. Reflection stages are as follows –

Stage 1: Description of the event

Describe in detail the event you are reflecting on. Include where you were;who else was there; why were you there; what were you doing; what were other people doing; what the context of the event was; what happened; what your part in this was; what parts did the other people play; what was the result.

Stage 2: Feelings and Thoughts (Self awareness)

At this stage, try to recall and explore those things that were going on inside your head. Include:

• How you were feeling when the event started?
• What you were thinking about at the time?
• How did it make you feel?
• How did other people make you feel?
• How did you feel about the outcome of the event?
• What do you think about it now?

Stage 3: Evaluation

Try to evaluate or make a judgement about what has happened. Consider what was good about the experience and what was bad about the experience or what did or did not go so well.

Stage 4: Analysis

Break the event down into its component parts so they can be explored separately. You may need to ask more detailed questions about the answers to the last stage. Include:

• What went well?
• What did you do well?
• What did others do well?
• What went wrong or did not turn out how it should have done?
• In what way did you or others contribute to this?

Stage 5: Conclusion 

This differs from the evaluation stage in that now you have explored the issue from different angles and have a lot of information to base your judgement. It is here that you are likely to develop insight into you own and other people’s behaviour in terms of how they contributed to the outcome of the event. Remember the purpose of reflection is to learn from an experience. Without detailed analysis and honest exploration that occurs during all the previous stages, it is unlikely that all aspects of the event will be taken into account and therefore valuable opportunities for learning can be missed. During this stage you should ask yourself what you could have done differently.

Stage 6: Action Plan 

During this stage you should think yourself forward into encountering the event again and to plan what you would do – would you act differently or would you be likely to do the same?

Why is reflective practice so important?

Reflecting on your practice can enhance and improve your confidence and self esteem because you can look at what you are doing well, the things you have learnt and achieved and feel good about yourself especially if you have done something with ease that you used to find difficult or if you have done something good you never thought you would do. This then gives you confidence to continue working well and to aim to try other new things or to use what new skills or knowledge you have gained in your practice. As a social care worker you are responsible for providing care to the best of your ability to service user and their families. You need to focus on your knowledge, skills and behaviour to ensure that you are able to meet the demands made on you by this commitment.

Reflective practice is part of the requirement for social care worker constantly to update professional skills. Keeping a portfolio or plan or action offers considerable opportunity for reflection on ongoing development. Supervision and reviews enable you to identify strengths and areas of opportunity for future development.

You should consider the ways in which you interact and communicate with your colleagues, service user and other professionals. The profession depends on a culture of mutual support. You should aim to become self-aware, self-directing and in touch with any environment.

Quality and effective service delivery is about providing a service in the best possible way. It is about anticipating, conforming to and sometimes exceeding the clients’ expectations and requirements

Maintaining the effectiveness of service

In maintaining the effectiveness of the service, either at a service provider or individual worker level, it is essential to be clear on what the quality standards are and how they should be put into practice, and to monitor and regularly review how the service is performing in relation to those standards.

When you will reflect on your practice and evaluate them, you may bring some significant change in your practice to improve quality of individual’s life and service provision.

Some services arrange a process called a ‘self-assessment’, where each year they compare staff and client views on how they meet the standards. This information is combined and together, staff and clients decide on some actions for improving the service for the following year.

You will have to follow the codes of conduct and practice what is set out by government and your organisation In order to provide effective quality service.

As a social care worker you will have criteria to guide your practice and be clear about what standards of conduct you are expected to meet. You are encouraged to use the codes to examine your own practice and to look for areas in which you can improve.

To work accordance with codes of practice and conduct a social care worker must :

·           

      Protect the rights and promote the interests of service users and carers

·         Strive to establish and maintain the trust and confidence of service users and carers

·         Promote the independence of service users while protecting them as far as possible from danger or harm

·         Respect the rights of service users while seeking to ensure that your behaviour does not harm them or other people

·         Uphold public trust and confidence in social care services

·       Be accountable for the quality of their work and take responsibility for maintaining and improving their knowledge and skills.

Remember, you will have to comply with general codes of practice and conduct in your reflective practice or including your reflective practice in order to provide better quality services.

Checklist to evaluate practice :

• How did you approach your work?
• Was your approach positive?
• How did the way you worked affect the service users? 
• How did the way you worked affect your colleague?
• Which was the best aspect of the work you did?
• Which was the worst aspect of the work you did?
• Are there any areas in which you could improve?
• What are they and how you will you tackle them?       

---------------------------------- Foisal Talukdar

Abuse (Safeguarding of Vulnerable Adults)

 

Abuse : Abuse is a violation of an individual’s human and civil rights by any other person or persons which may cause significant harm to or exploitation of individual.

Who are they? : Abuser can be parents, family members, nurses, care professionals, informal carer, neighbour even in a word anyone.

Where can the abuse take place? : Abuse can take place anywhere. This includes:

• A person’s own home
• A friend or relative’s home
• A hospital
• Nursery
• A care home
• A day service
• An educational establishment
• A public place

Forms of abuse : There are many forms of abuse. They are  -

• Physical
• Sexual
• Emotional
• Financial
• Institutional
• Neglect         

Physical Abuse : Any abuse involving the use of force is classified as physical abuse. This can mean punching, hitting, kicking, burning or scalding. Even leaving service user in wet or soiled clothing or bedding, deliberate starvation or force feeding and refusal to allow access to toilet facilities are categorized as physical abuse.

Symptom :

• Unexplained signs of injury such as bruises, welts, or scars, especially if they appear symmetrically on two side of the body
• Broken bones, sprains, or dislocations
• Report of drug overdose or apparent failure to take medication regularly (a prescription has more remaining than it should)
• Broken eyeglasses or frames
• Signs of being restrained, such as rope marks on wrists
• Caregiver’s refusal to allow you to see the elder alone

Sexual Abuse : Sexual abuse is the involvement of people in sexual activities which they do not understand or which they have not given consent to.

Symptom :

•  Bruises around breasts or genitals
• Unexplained vaginal disease or genital infections
• Unexplained vaginal or anal bleeding
• Torn, stained, or bloody underclothing

Emotional or Psychological Abuse : Emotional abuse is any action which has an adverse effect on an individual’s mental wellbeing, causes suffering and effects their quality of life.

Symptom :

• Withdrawal, depression
• Cowering and fearfulness
• Change in sleep patterns
• Agitation, confusion, change in  behaviour
• Change in appetite/weight

Financial Abuse : Misuse or stealing of someone’s money, propetry, pension or other valuable because of their lack of knowledge or consciousness or they are not aware of it.

Symptom : Stealing from or defrauding someone, withholding money to buy food or medical treatment, manipulating or exploiting someone for financial gain, denying access to financial resources, preventing a person from working or controlling their choice of occupation, denying access to financial information such as how much money is coming in, how much is owed, controlling the bank accounts, taking away cheque book or credit cards.

Institutional Abuse : Institutional abuse involves failure of an organisation to provide appropriate and professional service to vulnerable people. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour that amount to discrimination through ignorance, thoughtlessness, stereotyping and rigid systems.

Symptom :    

•           Not providing healthcare, but charging for it
•           Overcharging or double billing for medical care or services
•           Getting kickbacks for referrals to other providers or prescribing certain drugs
•           Overmedicating or Under-medicating
• ·         Recommending fraudulent remedies for illness or other medical condition.

Neglect : Neglect is the failure to provide necessary care, assistance, guidance or attention that causes, or is reasonably likely to cause the person’s physical, mental or emotional harm or substantial damage to or loss of assets. Neglect has two forms. They are -

•   Active neglect which is the intentional withholding basic necessities of life (including care).
•   Passive neglect is not providing basic necessities of life because of lack of experience, information, or ability. 

What should you do?

Record and report to the responsible person. Do not distrust what you saw and what you have been told. Do not keep any secret. Do not promise to keep secret. Do not judge. Do not confront with the abuser about this issue. Keep safe all of the evidence. Do not tamper with evidence. Record and report clearly to your manager in appropriate form without any delay. If not confident to report to the manager then report it to the following authority : Local authority Adult Services Dept. (Social Services), Police, Care Quality Commission, Independent Safeguarding Authority, NSPCC.

Sources of Information and Support : More information and support you may have from –

Manager , Local authority Adult Services Dept (Social Services)

Policies and Procedures, Internet, Books,

Care Quality Commission

Independent Safeguarding Authority 

Identify Ways to Ensure That Evidence of Abuse is Preserved national policies and local 

By Md. Foisal MiahTalukdar