Christopher Johns

Transforming Nursing Through Reflective Practice

Foreword by Jean Watson.List of Contributors.1. Expanding the Gates of Perception.2. Evidence, Memory and Truth: Towards a Deconstructive Validation of Reflective Practice.3. Living Relational Ethics in Health Care.4. Reflective Practice and Socratic Dialogue.5. Clinical Supervision in the Context of Custodial Care.6. Developing Prison Health Care through Reflective Practice.7. Voice as a Metaphor for Transformation through Reflection.8. Reflexivity and Intersubjectivity in Clinical Supervision: On the Value of Not-knowing.9. The Beast and the Star: Resolving Contradictions within Everyday Practice.10. Using Reflection in Complementary Therapies: Critical Reflection and Pain Management.11. Creating Sacred Space: A Journey to the Soul.12. Constructing the Reflexive Narrative.Index

Unravelling The Dilemmas Within Everyday Nursing Practice

Each day, nurse practitioners are faced with clinical situations and dilemmas that have no obvious right answers. This article sets out the process of ethical mapping as a reflective device to enable practitioners to reflect on dilemmas of practice in order to learn through the experience and inform future practice. Ethical mapping is illustrated around a single experience that an intensive care practitioner shared in an ongoing guided reflection relationship. Within this process the practitioner draws on ethical principles to inform the particular situation, notably autonomy, doing harm, truth telling and advocacy. Through reflection, ethical principles are transcended and assimilated into knowing in practice, enabling the practitioner to become more ethically sensitive in responding to future situations.

Can reflexology maintain or improve the well-being of people with Parkinson's Disease?

This study explored whether reflexology could improve or sustain the wellbeing of people with Parkinosns Disease [PD] using the PDQ39 wellbeing tool designed specifically for use with people with PD. The treatmnt protocal involved giving 8 therapy sessions to 16 people with varying derees of PD in a cross-over design to enable a longitudinal survey of impact. Whilst the results reflected the progressive nature of PD deterioration over time there was an improvement in wellbeing over the active therapy phase. These results suggest that continuous two- three weekly reflexology may limit further deteroration or maintain improvement of wellbeing. A further study is indicated to study this hypothesis.

Reflection on My Mother Dying A Story of Caring Shame

In this story, the author reflects on visiting his mother the day before she died, just a few days after her transfer from the general hospital. Previously, his mother had lived in a residential home for 3 years before stumbling and breaking her leg. Then she required hospital admission. Three months later, clearly dying, “they” transferred her to the nursing home. The story is an expose of poor care and the despair this caused for the family at such a critical time. The story is offered as a call for action.

Easing Into the Light

Reflection offers the practitioner the opportunity to access and learn through experience. It taps personal knowing and reveals the intuitive basis for practice. Reflection can also be a research process of self-inquiry and transformation whereby reflective accounts are carefully interpreted as hermeneutic text and written as a reflexive narrative. Narrative is always left open for further interpretation in light of the reader’s own practice perspectives. This paper presents a particular experience taken from a 2-year narrative, illuminating the craft of reflective writing and narrative construction. The text reveals the way I use concepts in taken-for-granted ways, and make assumptions in efforts to make sense of the world. Finally, the emancipatory intent of narrative is considered.