Reflection: Childbirth and Vital Signs Essay

Reflective practice in nursing is the process where we examine our nursing ability’s and practice in order to critically think and analyze the way we work and think about the views of others in our practice, what we could have done and we could have achieved a greater result by doing this also allows us as nurses to include best practice and use our own judgment in patient care to show the factors that either aid and hinder nurse to patient relationship. (Lowenstein, Bradshaw and Fuszard, 2001) described reflecting in nursing practice “the nurse must first come to understand what he or she defines as ideal practice”.

As of 2013, around 353,000 babies were born in one day, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (Be Fruitful and Multiply). Delivering babies is very difficult and strenuous, luckily labor and delivery nurses are trained to help care for the mother during the process of welcoming her newborn into the world safely. Labor and delivery nurses play a very crucial role in helping the delivery of babies and bringing safety and peace to the mother. I am choosing to pursue a career as a labor and delivery nurse because they get to provide care to babies, they get paid well, and they get to assist in the delivery process.

Gibbs, G. (1988). Learning by doing: A Guide to Teaching and Learning Methods. FEU:Great Britain.

Reflection can be defined as “a process of reviewing an experience of practice in order to describe, analyse and evaluate and so inform learning from practice.”(Reid, 1993) It is an important factor when working within any health profession and midwifery is certainly no exception. Schon (1991) defines a reflective practitioner as “someone who learns by reflecting on current experience and applies that learning to future practice.” Reflection allows midwives to grow and develop professionally as well as personally (Kirkham, 1994) and can guide her into moulding her sphere practice in a positive way to benefit the women she is caring for (Church & Raynor, 2000). It also allows midwives to continue with lifelong learning and put theory to

Reflection is an important tool for all health care practitioners. It can improve our skills and help us understand the choices we make while in practice. Williams (2001) states that “Reflective learning involves assessment and re-assessment of assumptions and critical reflection occurs whenever

Gibbs, G (1988) Learning by Doing, A guide to teaching and learning methods. Cheltenham: The Geography Discipline Network. (GDN).

In recent years, reflection and reflective practice have become well-known term with in the health care arena. They are words that have been debated and discussed with in the health care setting (Tony and Sue 2006). Reflective practice is essential for nurses, as nurses are responsible for providing care to the best of their ability to patients and their families (NMC, 2008). Reid (1993) states reflection is a process of reviewing an experience of practice in order to describe, analyse, evaluate and so inform learning about practice. Johns (1995) notes that reflection enables practitioners to assess, understand and learn through their experience. Reflective practice, therefore, offers nurses an opportunity to review their decisions and

From the lecture, I learned that pregnancy can be a very unique experience for different types of people and can surely be a psychological challenge. With this this new understanding, it became easy to recognize why midwives could end up being very beneficial for expecting mothers, all the way throughout the process of pregnancy. This is where I became particularly interested because besides the midwives job having the women understand the process of pregnancy, it was their job to help the women attain a certain level of peace and calm, all the way throughout the process, as they have someone that they come to trust right up until the end. Having the women in the mindset that it will be a good experience is vital in making it be so in actuality.

Being a midwife does not only defined by assisting women in childbirth. The general dictionary definition are the misconception of how people view midwives. Being a midwife means to be ‘with women’ and this leads the construction of the midwifery philosophy, Page (2006) 5 steps and Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA) competency standards, in order to provide the best women centred care (Australia Collage of Midwives, 2017). This essay will cover a constructive overview of what Page (2006) 5 steps of being a midwife means, it will also defined what women centred care is and emphasis on the importance it has for the woman. Understanding Page (2006) 5 steps and women centred care helped build the pathway for midwifery philosophy to correlate with NMBA competency standard in order to support midwifery practice. For

For this reflective piece I am going to write about a situation I encountered whilst on my community placement with the district nurse. To write the essay I will be following "Johns model of structured reflection" as a basis to structure my reflection around.

Using Gibbs (1998, cited in Bulman and Schutz, 2013, P. 232) model of reflection I will analyse the case and evaluate my learning experiences. To comply with the Nursing and Midwifery Council (2008), I have changed the names of all the individuals mentioned in order to maintain confidentiality.

Globally, estimated 1.5 billion women were of childbearing age (15 to 45 years old) in 2011; 26% (310.62 million) of them covered by India only. Among 1.5 billion, 210 million become pregnant every year; of which; 86.66% (accounting as 182 million) of in developing world and remaining 13.33% (28 million) was in developed countries. 1, 2 Similarly 139.65 million births were in 2009 in the world and 26.92 million only in India.2 Pregnancy and childbirth are special events in women’s lives. This can be a time of great hope and joyful anticipation3. Though pregnancy and childbirth are a natural and usual phenomenon, these events put every woman at risk of complications and it directly/indirectly affect to the growth and development of the infant. Most maternal and child deaths occur during late pregnancy and the first year of the child’s life respectively.4

In this assignment I am going to reflect on a clinical situation that has taken place during my placement. I will be using the Gibbs’ reflective cycle which will include the skills of assessment, planning, implementation and evaluation of care and link it to the registered nurse standards for practice – standard 4 , comprehensively conducts and assessments (nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia [NMBA], 2016). The Gibbs’ reflective cycle consists of 6 stages which starts with a description of the situation and what I observed, the second stage is to describe what were my feelings and thoughts were at the time, third stage is an evaluation to explain what worked well and what was good, fourth is an analysis to link the incident to what we have been learning , fifth stage is the conclusion to talk about what else could have been done and the final stage is an action plan to set out next steps for if it was to happen again (Gibbs' Reflective Cycle, 2014).

Furthermore, Sudden Infant Death is growing across the world and I believe that it will be wise and good to know which countries are affected by this sudden deaths that affects babies. According the Nation Master website research, Angolo is the country with the high rate of Sudden Infant Death. The countries followed by Angolo all the way to the tenth position are mostly African countries. When I saw the rankings I wasn't really surprised that African countries would be on t top of the list. Just think about the struggles and obstacles that most pregnant women face in their native countries in Africa. Just think about the health care services that pregnant women in other countries receive in other countries excluding countries in Africa. Since most women in African countries don’t receive proper health care, they don't really know and understand how to give birth to a healthy

Infant mortality is divided into neonatal mortality (deaths in the first 27 days of life per 1000 live births), and postneonatal mortality (deaths from 28 days to 364 days of life per 1000 live births minus neonatal deaths). The World Health Organization defines maternal mortality as “the death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and site of the pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management but not from accidental or incidental causes” (Kotch, 2013). Maternal morbidity is defined as “any health condition attributed to and/or aggravated by pregnancy and childbirth that has a negative impact on the woman’s wellbeing” (Maternal Health,