Well, the title says it all. I have written a reflective essay for my work mentorship program. I chose an incident to reflect on and looked at several aspects (mostly negative, I have to admit) surrounding the way that poor mentorship process and interference (by an officer) left my student feeling VERY negative about the case, when really she had every reason to feel good.

I have used Gibb's reflective cycle to look at each aspect of the case and the pertinent points are-

Officer separating the student and I, despite being there to observe us both in practice.

Officer failing to accept the student's findings regarding the patient's condition

Failing to involve the student fully when the patient rapidly deteriorated

Failing to follow a satisfactory debriefing process which could have encouraged the student- I was never trained in debriefing techniques, BTW.

Failing to offer the student an opportunity for a debriefing in private where the officer's actions could be discussed.

Those are the main ones, but here's the problem. I cannot find a SINGLE reference that covers ANY of the points I wish to reflect on. NOT ONE!!

No matter what search terms I use, I cannot find ANYTHING relevant to what I want to say on Google or Yahoo and I've read an entire (small) book on nursing mentorship and preceptorship and got diddly-squat.

Can anyone help with some pointers? I'll mention you in my will. You won't get anything, but I'll mention you

Who is this officer? Police or someone else?

Edit: What are you wanting to say with this essay? Are you wanting to demonstrate why various things are failings, or what should have been done differently or both? Is this towards a qualification of any sort, and if so what level of qualification?

Have asked the Wench, as she's a bit of a master at the whole essay writing thing

does he simply want to state what happened, or try to go into possible future strategies to alter things
a quote that may back up some of the points 'However, as late as 2005 UK ambulance services were providing paramedic training that, concentrates on life threatening conditions with protocol driven practice, based on limited underpinning knowledge' (Cooper, 2005: 375)'
could use this to demonstrate the lack of underpinning and support that the student had had, and therefore that the officer should have been aware of
taken from the Carrick Report, which is a really long report, thankfully as a PDF, for ease of searching
accessed here:
http://www.jephc.com/Vol7Issue2/CarrickReportFull.pdf
maybe suggest that he looks at Woolcock, M., Gregory, P. and Jones, T. (2005) Training for emergency care practitioners: university certificate, BSc or Masters Degree? Journal of Emergency Primary Health Care, 3 (3).
this focuses on paramedic education, and have taken up the critique and analysis of various syllabi and abbreviated training programs, to contribute a pen sketch of what is needed to produce autonomous practitioners.
it seems to be something that would go hand in hand with saying that there is a need for better understanding throughout the service of the levels of knowledge that students have, and the best way to improve this
Willis, E. Dwyer, J. and Dunne, S. (2008) Chapter 6 - The collectivity of healthcare: multidisciplinary team care, In Sorensen R and Iedema R (eds) Managing Clinical Processes in the Health Services, Melbourne: Elsevier.
These people state that "Another quality central to autonomous practitioners is a capacity for collaboration with other health professionals and engagement in multidisciplinary care"
without the development of autonomous skills, through appropriate mentoring, and active involvement in incidents, critical or otherwise, students are not able to progress to being the well-rounded paramedics that are needed. In the field, it is crucial that paramedics of all levels have an appropriate level of confidence in their skills, with too much confidence, they will fail to be
self-monitoring, and may become lacksidasical in their treatment of patients. With too little confidence, they will question their judgements at all times, and will hesitate when there are difficult, but time-critical decisions to be made, thus resulting in a potentially lower level of care given.

A reflective essay you say...



There you go

I would have finished the post a little more neatly, but got sent out. Sorry.

@jonlumb.

It was an ambulance officer, there to observe me mentoring the student, but he split us up. There were clinical reasons why this was inappropriate, but the reflection is on the mentoring aspect- if I wasn't with the student, then I couldn't mentor her. He then ignored her findings related to the patient's condition- they were correct but he dismissed them.

When all was said and done, the student should have had good reason to feel good about what she had done during the incident, but the negativity in the incident which could have been resolved with a proper debriefing, but wasn't, left her feeling [LIFTED] awful.

I want to reflect on the incident and learn from it- actually, I've already done the learning, but as it is supposed to be an academic piece, I've got to find four or maybe five related references and despite the fact that both I and her indoors have looked, I've struggled to find anything about problems that occur in the mentorship process unless they are very specific to a particular activity.

Thanks for that information. I'll have to give it a look later.

And Oliver. Cheers. It doesn't help, but if no-one posted something stupid on here, I'd have been disappointed.