Learning from Decision Making

Abstract

This chapter explores the concept of learning from your experience in clinical practice, and is designed to help you to use reflection as a means of learning both to make decisions in practice and to learn from the decisions that you have made. The use and value of reflective practice will be explored in many of the chapters to come; it is considered to be essential in the development of decision-making skills as a student nurse, and for your ongoing personal and professional development as a qualified registered nurse. Learning from experience is often referred to as ‘experiential learning’ and one of its key skills is reflection. In other words, reflection is the key to helping you to use experiences as a student and a person in order to learn from them. This chapter will provide some definitions of reflection and will introduce some commonly used frameworks or models that can help you to develop the underpinning skills required if you are to be a reflective practitioner. There are also activities for you to complete, so that you can begin to use a range of different frameworks that are appropriate to different situations. To place reflection in the context of your learning to become a nurse and therefore to achieve the appropriate competencies, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) states that: We can see from this statement that there appear to be some key assumptions and activities that are seen as working together, including reflection, and these will be explored particularly in this chapter. Reflection on practice, and subsequently for learning from this practice, will be two of the most important aspects that will be addressed. To begin with, however, we need to consider some of the underlying principles in which reflection and reflective practice are embedded. Learning from our experiences means that we can either use what we have learned to develop and to enhance future experiences, or alternatively that we can learn from any mistakes that we may have made in the anticipation that we will not make the same ones again.