Professional Growth During the Clinical Experience

FINAL CLINICAL REFLECTION JOURNAL WRITING TIPS
*General Tips:
-This assignment is due 7 days after your last DFC is complete. Please do not submit early or it will be given a score of 0, marked missing, and will need to be resubmitted after your last DFC so that you can include reflection from all your DFCs.

• Follow the rubric closely, making sure that you are covering each of the required elements in the rubric criteria as you write your paper. The bulleted topics in your module instructions provide topics to think about, but your reflection should not be limited to these.

-The Final Reflection Journal should be formatted per APA guidelines and a cover page is required.

-Please note that the length of the Final Reflection Journal must be at least 2 pages, not including the cover page or reference page.
-This assignment’s expectation is to reflect on your personal and professional growth during the clinical experience. This should not be an evaluation of the clinical site, staff, facilitators, placement, scheduling, or the college. The evaluations you complete each day are the appropriate place to include this feedback.
*Professional Competence: This section should include your areas of professional strength and weakness. Include specific competencies you developed during your clinical experiences. What skills were you able to perform confidently and what skills do you need to practice more? Include skills, subject knowledge, and work processes such as time management and prioritization. You should also include the underlying reasons for the strengths and weaknesses (or why you think they are a strength or a weakness) and a measurable plan for improvement. Think about how you can measure your actions for improvement.

*Challenging Situations in the Clinical Setting: Please describe clinical experiences which were challenging for you during the DFCs; these would be related to your personal clinical practice. Think about the challenges you experienced while delivering patient care. What were reasons for these patient care challenges? Challenging situations do not have to translate to “bad” situations. These can be experiences that promoted growth and/or the gaining of knowledge. You need to analyze (or discuss in detail) the experience(s). You should consider and describe the underlying causes (or reasons) for the challenges you identified and ways to improve upon these in future patient care experiences. For example, was there a fast pace on the unit? How did you feel and how did you handle it? How can you improve your time management? Please include a plan to help you prevent similar situations in your future clinical experiences. Think about what you can do differently so that those challenges may not occur in the future. This section needs specific examples from your days in clinical.

*Personal and Professional Growth: Please discuss specific examples of the personal and professional growth you experienced during your clinical. What were your goals for your clinicals, and were they met? Based upon this semester’s clinical experiences, think about and discuss specific goals for future clinicals and how you would fulfill these goals (the specific steps you can take to reach your goals). In this section you should also include feedback you received (from the nurse, facilitator, or client) and discuss what changes you will make moving forward because of the feedback you received.