The previous articles in this series have explored many of the very tangible aspects of continuing professional development (CPD), ranging from problem-solving and financing to mentoring and postgraduate degrees. This article focuses on a less tangible concept, but one that underpins and unites many of the key factors of CPD—that of reflection.
Many clinical staff whose daily workload is heavy and whose home life is demanding will view reflection as a time-consuming luxury. Although we may value the place of reflective practice in our patient care, we rarely give our own personal needs the same priority. We spend little time and energy reflecting on where we are and where we want to be in the next few years. Take some time for yourself and invest the next 10 minutes, as you read this article, to reflect on your own CPD needs and to think about how you can take control of your career and move forward positively.
Reflective assessment
Take a few moments to reflect on where you are in your professional career. How long have you been in your current role? What have you learnt? What are your clinical strengths? What are your weaknesses? Reflect on the benefits and opportunities that your current job offers; do these benefits outweigh any negative aspects that you are currently experiencing? Take some time to put yourself and your personal needs first. What do you want from your career both now and in a few years' time? What will help you achieve your ambitions? Identify the difficulties in achieving your aims.
Finally, think about what CPD means to you: is it just about ticking boxes, further study and promotion? For me, CPD has always been about the means by which I can balance areas of work that I enjoy and the practicalities of family life. Further study, courses and promotion, although important, have never for me been the sole focus of CPD. If you have just quickly skimmed through this paragraph, take a little time to genuinely reflect on what your own ‘holistic’ CPD needs are; having done that, identify your top three priorities.
Reflective planning
Having identified your CPD priorities, take some time to plan the various ways that you can begin to meet these objectives. Use your reflective skills to explore options and plan positive ways forward. Explore the various ways in which you want to develop your CPD and analyse the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of each option.
Identify key people who can help you achieve your objectives. Use your reflection skills to think through how best to approach these people, how to present your case and how to involve them in your CPD. Develop your plan, but create within it some flexibility if opportunities do not materialise as you hope.
Reflection during CPD
Once you have embarked on your chosen aspect of CPD, make sure you build time into your life to actively reflect on whatever it is your are doing. Writing essays and completing coursework is important, but it has little value if you do not take the time and energy to reflect on what it is you are learning and how it can influence and inform your future practice. I have witnessed too many nurses undertake courses with an almost clinical detachment; it takes genuine reflective abilities to draw theory and practice together in ways that genuinely develop clinical practice and professional maturity.
Reflective evaluation
How much do you learn from your successes? How much do you learn from your failures? It often said that people learn more from their failures than from their successes, and, while there is some truth in that, our aim should be to build upon what we do well and build up what we are not so good at. What is certain is that we learn very little by doing nothing. If reflection becomes part of our ordinary way of working and thinking, then we will always be building on our experiences, be they structured courses or everyday clinical work. Reflection that focuses on evaluating what we have done, why we have done it and what the outcomes were, will provide us with positive and useful building blocks on which to develop our professional practice and careers.
The principle of the nursing process that I have adapted above as a ‘reflective CPD process’ cannot, as you will know from your clinical experience, be translated into practice as simple unconnected steps. The process I have discussed, like the nursing process, is a cyclical, dynamic, ongoing interconnected process. It may start with a clear assessment of needs, but these needs must be adapted or refined as CPD progresses. Implementation may become refocused as ongoing evaluation highlights other options that become available to you. This cyclical flexibility is dependent upon your skills of reflection: reflection on your changing needs, your changing interests and the increasing self-recognition of your developing abilities and full potential.
Reflection is not just a tick-box exercise to satisfy some revalidation requirement, it is a valuable tool that can serve your clinical and professional practice. Like all skills it must be developed and practised if you want it to become an integral part of you.