Reflective practice is when you can look back at your experience and review what can be done better in order to improve. The aim of reflective practice is to develop yourself as a nurse in the healthcare profession. This is to work on and improve personal and physical skills that you may lack, to better your performance as a health care professional and provide service users for the best possible care. In this assignment we are going to be reflecting on the database search from CIANHL using Rolfe et al (2001) reflective model. We will be using this model because it is easy to follow, and the steps are easy to remember.
The topic that I chose for the database search was “What is the Psychological impact of working shifts on nurses?” I choose this topic because I thought it would be interesting to find out the psychological impacts that work shifts have on nurses and how this may affect them. Long work shifts can cause increased mental health issues such as anxiety, depression and increased fatigue which may result in you reduced efficiently at work as a result of long hours. The database that I used was CIANHL complete, which provided me with the best nursing journals and publications from the National League of Nursing and the American Nurses Association (Health.ebsco.com, 2019). It’s useful when looking for substantial and reliable information relating to nursing.
In order for me to find the keywords that I would put into the database, I looked at the main points in the question which where “psychological impact”, “work shifts” and “nurses”. These were the words that I put into the database search and in order to broaden my search results, I also put in words that related to work shift, like ‘work pattern.’ I could have used a wider vocabulary of words that further relates to psychological impact such as anxiety, depression and mental health as well as nurse and nursing which relate to nurses which could have improved the results that I got.
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To carry out my search I used the Boolean operators, which are simple words such as (AND, OR, NOT or AND NOT) and are used as conjunctions to combine or exclude keywords in a search (Library.alliant.edu, 2019). From this the results shown are more focused and productive which saves time. The operators can either increase or reduce the amount of results shown. They reduce the amount of results by eliminating data that isn’t relevant. To improve my database search, I could have used some more conjunctions which would make my search more focused.
From my search I found there to be 41 hits which was useful as they were refined to a number that would be easy for me to look at all the results found. From all the finding that I found, some of them were relevant and some weren’t. This is because some of the results had a few of the key words but not all the key words so were not relevant.
I think that my search was successful as I was able to generate I suitable amount of hits from the keywords that I put in the database search which are related to the topic that I chose. Also, most of the results that I found were relevant as they were all from either nursing journals or publications from the national league of nursing and the American nurses association. This makes my results reliable and so suitable to use.
Although my search was successful there are some things that I could have done to improve it. I could have used more synonyms or relevant words so that I get more results that are relevant to my topic. Also, to improve it I could have put nurs* as one of the key words to put in my database search. Some challenges that I faced when undertaking the search was trying to refine my findings so that the hits weren’t too high. This meant I had to change my key words in order to lower the amount of results found. Another challenge that I found was that I did find it hard to think of other words to put into the search that are related to the topic.
In the future if I was to face these challenges again, I would plan what I was going to put into the search before just doing it or think about other words related that I could put in that as then I would not have wasted time trying to refine it so much. Planning would have also helped me to find the best journal articles to support my research and learning. This search was very helpful and will benefit me in the future as a nurse because it will be useful when trying to find information as the database search is reliable as it consists of highly peer reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, dissertations and other sources. This will increase my knowledge to a wider scale, which is useful when learning.
Reflective practice has a big impact as it has huge benefits in increasing self-awareness and having a better understanding of others as well. It can also help me to develop creative thinking skills which are great for when engaging in work processes which require you to think on the spot. So reflective practice has helped my learning as it has provided me with great skills that I can use in the future.
In conclusion from my reflection have shown what reflective practice is and the different skills I have developed from it. In addition to this I have also described how I undertook my database search, including how I found the key words that I would be putting in the search as well describing what a Boolean operator is which is required in the search. I also explained how my database search was successful but also the challenges that I faced when doing the search and how I would overcome them next time. Overall, I have found the database search to be very helpful and I will be using it again in the future.
References
- https://subjects.library.manchester.ac.uk/nursing/databases/
- https://www.cipd.co.uk/Images/reflective-practice-guide_tcm18-12524.pdf HYPERLINK “
- https://www.nursinginpractice.com/professional/how-reflect-your-practice”
- https://www.nursinginpractice.com/professional/how-reflect-your-practice
- https://www.rcn.org.uk/professional-development/revalidation/reflection-and-reflective-discussion
- https://health.ebsco.com/products/the-cinahl-database
- https://library.alliant.edu/screens/boolean.pdf HYPERLINK “
- https://www.skillsyouneed.com/ps/reflective-practice.html”
- https://www.skillsyouneed.com/ps/reflective-practice.html
