Advancing the quality of care and nursing practice through emancipatory reflection

Abstract

Reflection is a fundamental skill of health-care professionals and plays an important role in ensuring the quality of care in health-care practice. It is believed that undertaking reflection in practice can help nurses develop an awareness of a sense of personal power and agency, cultivate their critical thinking ability and help them promote their professional development. However, reflection has not been introduced widely as a nursing curriculum in China, and literature shows that some clinical nurses lack critical thinking skills and critical reflective practice skills by reason of not receiving systematic education on reflection when they were at nursing college. Therefore, we present a series of seven articles focused on prevalent and interesting practice-based events to reflect on in this special issue. The main aim is to disseminate reflective methodology and techniques and present examples of reflective writing for nurses. It is expected that these articles will help to lead Chinese nurses to adopt critical emancipatory reflective processes to bring about transformative actions.

Developing reflective competence between simulation and clinical practice through a learning transference model: A qualitative study

“…The pedagogical resource presented in this research commits to the connection between experience and knowledge. Students' competence and skills improve when they are able to reflect on critical incidents or events of daily practice (Andersen, 2016;Yu, Ling, & Hu, 2019).…”

The development of self skills in an authentic learning environment: A qualitative study

“…It is thus recommended that nurse educators exercise patience and perseverance to assist learners develop these skills properly because the more the learners use these self skills, the more readily they will develop them (Jumari et al 2018 ). It is further recommended that nurse educators make the teaching of self skills compulsory in the curriculum within an AL environment with explicitly stipulated objectives and teaching, demonstration and evaluation strategies, the same way cognitive and psychomotor skills are taught (Benn 2018 ; Kosior et al 2019 ; Yu, Ling & Hu 2019 ).…”