Reflective practice

The hardest part about this Thing for me is trying to decide what to reflect on in the first place. There are several possibilities, but I don’t feel I can evaluate any of them as fully as I’d like to. However, I’m guessing one of the tricks of reflective practice is to learn how to do so with situations that, at first thought, you can’t think of anything to write about. Maybe with practice an experienced reflective practitioner can write something about any given situation, and this is what I should aspire to. Sounds good in theory. Let’s give it a go.

The most obvious situation to try writing about is a meeting I attended recently, where I was introducing myself to potential users of my services. I had to impress upon them why it was a good idea to use me as a resource (a source of medical information that could be called upon to meet them and discuss their needs, them being GP practice managers and their staff).

I learnt that they have another source of information they can tap into so I had to quickly think of reasons why they should use me as well. Thinking on your feet can be essential in this job, and I’m beginning to discover.

I enjoyed meeting with them. They were all really nice people, and part of my job is going out and meeting people. A large part of my job is going out and meeting people for various reasons, and while I don’t like using the telephone, meeting people in person is one of my great strengths, I’ve found. As is modesty, apparently.

What worked well – NHS staff all have access to large amounts of information online, if they so wish, but they have to register to access it, and a lot of people don’t even know about it. When trying to get them to take up registration, I pointed out some of the resources that they could get access to, which interested them.

What went wrong – this links in to the thinking on my feet bit above. They told me they already had access to an information source they could draw on, and I didn’t even know about it, which I probably should have.

I don’t think I’d change anything about that particular meeting – it seemed to go very well, and the only down points were over things I couldn’t really have done anything about. However, there have been many other occasions, during meetings, training sessions and so on, where I would have changed a lot of things!

The potential impact could be quite big – this is possibly a good source of work for me, and so it could add to my workload greatly (which it’s supposed to!), plus the fact that I may have gleaned another contact from the meeting so as to expand even further!

I’ve already taken action: I took the contact detail from the last point and emailed this new person. I’m hoping to hear back by next week – if I don’t I may have to call to try and set up a meeting.

As I was writing this, I noticed that it’s stuff I tend to do anyway after meetings, training or other work. I’m always on the lookout for ways to improve my working, so I tend to ask for advice on what I did badly, what I did well and how I could improve whatever I did from the people I work with.