Reflective Practice Enhances Public Health Nurse Implementation of Nurse‐Family Partnership

Abstract

Reflective practice is defined as a cyclical process involving a series of phases in which an individual describes a salient event, attends to his/her positive and negative feelings about the event, and ultimately reexamines the experience in an effort to understand and to plan how he or she would act in a similar situation in the future. This paper describes how the concept of reflective practice is integrated into the evidence-based Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) program. The pivotal role of the nursing supervisor in guiding nurses to engage in reflection on their work with families is emphasized. Exemplars drawn from the experience of 2 NFP nursing supervisors are presented to illustrate how reflection in the NFP program is operationalized. The benefits as well as the challenges to the use of reflective practice are also discussed. While anecdotal comments from NFP nurses and supervisors are cited to suggest how the regular use of reflective practice has the potential to improve implementation of the program with families, the authors further propose that research is needed to more rigorously examine the benefits that reflective practice may have on the quality of program implementation, family outcomes, and the retention of nurses working in the NFP program.