A Step-by-Step Guide to Write a Nursing Reflective Essay with Examples

Writing reflective essays is a highly effective tool for intellectual and personal development. It provides a rare chance to explore one’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences in detail. Reflective writing enables an analytical and personal approach, allowing writers to examine how certain events have impacted their understanding and opinions.

If you are a student of nursing, you will undoubtedly get a nursing reflective essay assignment. This could be a difficult and demanding task. With the assistance of essay writing companies in the UK, you can craft compelling reflective papers. These platforms provide nursing students with an opportunity to practise their abilities and broaden their knowledge.

But if you are looking for advice on how to write a nursing essay like a professional, continue reading this article. Here, we shall provide you with tips and tricks on how to write a comprehensive paper, including what to avoid, what to include, and reflection ideas.

But let’s first define the nursing reflective essay before moving on to the strategies.

What is a Nursing Reflective Essay?

In writing nursing reflective essays, students are involved in contrasting personal insights with clinical experiences to incorporate a description of learning and development. Both skill improvement and career advancement in the nursing industry are aided by writing a reflective essay in nursing.

7 Steps to Write a Nursing Reflective Essay

Writing a nursing reflective essay is an essential part of nursing education because it enables both professionals and students to engage in self-evaluation and enhance clinical practice. With the help of this 7-step strategy, you should be able to create a nursing reflective essay that shows your analytical skills, professional growth, and critical thinking.

This comprehensive guide will lead you through the steps of writing a well-written and organised nursing reflection essay. Here are the core insights of this article:

Let’s continue reading the steps to write a reflective nursing essay.

1. Remove the Distractions

Writing a reflective essay is a crucial skill for nurses to acquire since it enables them to reflect critically on their experiences and advance their profession. However, finding the time and concentration to create a well-organised and meaningful reflection essay might be difficult, given the demands of a busy nursing schedule.

Here, we’ll provide you with useful techniques to help you put aside distractions and produce a superior nursing reflective essay. It is important to identify the distractions that could influence your writing process before proceeding. Some of the most common sources of distraction are:

• Email notifications and social media
• Relatives or colleagues trying to engage you in conversation
• An untidy workplace or excessive noise
• Mild tiredness or lack of stamina
• Tendency to slow down the pace due to the pursuit of perfection.

How to Control these Distractions?

The following measures could control the distractors:

• Inform your family members about your work so that they try to avoid interrupting you at least during certain timeframes.
• Inform your colleagues that you require quiet time for your work.
• Turn off the email notifications and social media or sign out of your email or social media accounts.
• Ensure that your table is tidy and the place is clean and organised.
• Work in the times when others are not making too much noise.
• Take breaks to regenerate and create a greater concentration span.
• If perfectionism is an issue, subdivide your article into smaller sections.

Establish a Writing Schedule

Developing a writing schedule will help to keep you on task and move your reflective essay forward.

Here are a few ideas:

• Set clear deadlines and writing goals.
• Designate a specific time each day or week for writing.
• To help you get started, try out a warm-up or some free writing.
• Keep reviewing and editing your work regularly, ensuring you are on point.

2. Understand the Purpose of Reflective Writing

Reflective writing is mostly applied in the identification and analysis of both individual and occupational strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). You can get a deeper comprehension of the complexities of nursing practice.

In addition, incorporating reflection into your writing can enhance your capacity for future decision-making. The appropriate use of a thoughtful perspective can help nurses better understand their practice and apply critical thinking to the services they provide, thus improving patient care.

Main Objectives of Nursing Reflective Writing

• To recognise and confront ideas, prejudices, and attitudes that could affect patient care.
• Sharpen analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Enhance self-awareness, reflection and willpower.
• To support quality improvement and evidence-based practice efforts.
• Create a culture that encourages the pursuit of additional education and new careers.
• To improve communication and collaboration among healthcare teams, patients ​and families.

3. Choose a Relevant Experience

To write a meaningful and illuminating nursing reflective essay, you need to choose a relevant experience to recount. Since you are a nurse, you have likely encountered many situations that impacted your professional growth and practice.

The following suggestions may help you pick a relevant experience:

Select a Significant Event

Recall an experience, a meeting or an episode which had a strong influence on you, your patient or your co-worker. It could be a challenging situation, a success, or a turning point in the development of someone involved.

Reconsider Your Feelings on the Matter

By reflecting on your feelings during and after the event, you will have an easy time navigating your thoughts, whether you felt proud, nervous, sympathetic, or other emotions. It is quite an effective reflection of motivation.

Assess the Acquired Knowledge

It is important to remember the benefits of the event. Achieve fresh understanding, gain fresh perspectives, alter the way you care, and make the learning objective distinct. The event’s lessons will be very helpful for concentration.

A nursing reflective essay can effectively showcase one’s learning, development, and dedication to providing superior patient care by selecting a relevant experience and methodically reflecting on it.

4. Use a Reflective Model

As a nurse, one of the essential tasks you will need to be able to perform is to write a reflective essay. This is an assignment you are likely to get in nursing school, which requires you to reflect on a particular situation or an incident and talk about what you learned from it.

In a reflective essay, you should analyse your experiences, identify opportunities for improvement, and enhance patient care. In this section, we will explain the process of writing a reflective essay in nursing and provide an example to help you understand it better.

Select a Subject

Isolate a specific happening or episode in your nursing career that had a great impact on you or convinced you of something significant. It may be either a “bad” encounter with a patient, a good nursing procedure, or a mistake you had made. Your preferred subject should be sensible and relevant to your practice, allowing you to write a lengthy paper.

Describe the Event

Outline the incident clearly and comprehensively, describing its specific circumstances and the way it ended. The purpose of this section is to set the tone for your consideration and provide you with a reason for your essay. Use a reflecting model to guide your reflection while writing a nurse reflective essay, i.e., John’s Model of Reflection or Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle.

Normally, these models will include:

Description: Describe the incident in more detail, focusing on your feelings, thoughts, and actions.

Feelings: Reflect on how you felt and reacted both during and after the incident.

Evaluation: Reflect on the incident; what was good and what was bad about the event? Consider what was the outcome and what did or did not contribute to it.

Analysis: What were the main causes and results of that event? Consider your skills, knowledge, capabilities, behaviours, attitudes, etc.

Conclusion: Summarise the lesson learnt and discuss ways to use it in future practice.

Action: You should list specific actions you will take as a result of your reflection to improve your practice.

5. Format of a Reflective Nursing Essay

An essay format known as a “nursing reflective essay” enables nurses to consider their feelings, ideas, and experiences regarding a specific incident or circumstance that happened during their practice. The purpose of the essay is to assist nurses in identifying the lessons they would do differently in the future, what they have learned from the experience, and how they can use the knowledge gained to enhance their practice.

Here is an example of a reflective essay on nursing, along with its suggested format:

Introduction

• Provide a short description of the situation or event that you will be thinking about.
• Give some context to how the incident came about.
• Specify what your goals are and why you engage in reflection.

Description of the Event

• Explain completely the situation or event.
• Enter a description of the patient’s problems, treatment, and resolution.
• Grounding the scene with suggestive language and help readers understand what you are describing.

Reflection

• Recall what you felt, thought and did through the incident.
• What lessons have you learned from the event, and how did they change your practice?

Analysis

• Analyse the event using a reflective paradigm or framework (e.g., Johns’ model of Reflection or Gibbs’s Reflective Cycle).
• Identify what attitudes, skills and knowledge were demonstrated in the situation.
• How is this experience going to help you in your work, and what changes are you planning here?

Conclusion

• Summarise the reflection ideas in bullet form.
• What did you take away from the experience?

Identify the areas that need improvement and enhancement.

Example

6. Reflect on the Experience

Thinking back on experiences is a crucial element of professional development for nurses. By practising reflection, nurses can identify areas that need work, reinforce what they’ve learned, and gain a better comprehension of their role in patient care. Writing a reflective essay is a useful tool for experiencing reflection. The purposeful and methodical process of considering an experience to draw lessons from it is called reflection.

In this section, we will discuss how to reflect on experience and provide an example to help you understand the main points.

• It involves analysing what happened, figuring out what was learnt, and thinking about how to use whatever has been acquired in new circumstances.
• Reflection is essential for growing clinical skills, boosting patient safety, and improving patient outcomes in the setting of nursing.

Keep in mind that the majority of nurse reflection essays follow this general format, regardless of the subject you choose to write about:

Example

An example of a nursing reflective essay given in gleams of sun that explains the topic “A Reflection on Code Blues”.

Title: A reflection on code blues.

Introduction: I just finished my ICU rotation, in which I faced a code blue situation that pushed me to use what was lying there and attempt to apply some of my knowledge. It was powerful and moved people, yet it also gave perspective for self-growth.

Description: A patient who had suffered a heart attack and was suddenly worsening was given the code blue. I was in charge of helping with chest compressions and giving out medication as a member of the staff. We tried everything to get the patient to respond, but in the end, we had to call the code. I was overwhelmed by the incident and experienced a range of feelings, such as despair, frustration, and anxiety.

Analysis: After some thought, I saw that I had not adequately planned for the code blue scenario. I wasn’t familiar with the drug regimen, and I hadn’t looked over the patient’s paperwork in detail. This lack of preparation caused feelings of uncertainty and hesitancy during the programming. However, I also realized that I had followed the team leader’s directions and effectively interacted with the group. I learned from this experience how crucial it is to anticipate problems and take initiative when faced with pressure.

Conclusion: This event has shown that I need to become better equipped and more informed in code blue scenarios. I will thoroughly review patient paperwork and prescribe medication regimens to appropriately answer a code. I will also continue to practise proper communication skills so I can be a good leader in stressful situations.

Action Plan: To implement these changes. I will:

• Review deactivation of ICU code blue protocol and medications.
• Practice team communication through code-blue scenario simulations.
• A thorough chart review is required before responding to a code blue.

A reflective essay can be written using this format to analyse personal experiences and identify areas for professional growth as a nurse. Remember, as you reflect, be objective and honest about it all, and focus on the lessons learned from these experiences and your personal growth.

7. Edit And Revise

It’s time to wrap up your reflection essay on nursing. So, now that you have completed your essay, read it again and edit it. Check for consistency, coherence and clarity of text. Ensure your essay conforms to the reflective model you choose, and analysis provides adequate support for statements made of reflections recommended in your action plan.

Thus, we might figure out that the stages of writing that involve editing and rewriting are important. However, if you don’t have these skills, get your essays written by experts in the UK. These professionals use useful techniques to improve, organise, and eliminate errors in your work.

But you can also adhere to the following advice:

Editing Strategy

Following are the five tips to edit your nursing reflective essay:

Last-Minute Inventory

Following is the checklist for reflective essay submission:

• Is the essay smooth, flowing and well-organised?
• How clear and well-written is the text?
• Well, reviewing your nursing reflective assignment contains all the components required to complete Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle.
• Does the voice sound thoughtful and professional?
• Are the conclusions and recommendations based on evidence?

What is a Critical Reflection in Nursing?

Critical reflection in nursing essays is the process of self-analysis in which nurses examine their feelings, ideas, and behaviours.

A critical reflection is written in two stages.

Investigate

Ask insightful questions to help you understand the problem and your part in it in the first phase. Try free writing to come up with creative ideas.

Articulate

Utilise your analysis to build a convincing case for what you discovered in the second phase.

Final Thought

In conclusion, a nursing reflective essay is a complicated task which requires a significant amount of effort from the students. Several strategies take even more energy before you start writing your papers. So, some nursing students seek more advantageous solutions and buy essays online from professionals who possess the necessary expertise to compose their essays and make them stand out.

Finally, it’s time to put your newly acquired information into practice now that you are aware of the importance of reflective writing in the nursing field. In addition, you know the procedures and strategies for creating an essay that works. Give your experiences some thought so that you can improve both personally and professionally by learning from them.

By doing this, you’ll improve patient care and boost your nursing profession overall. So feel free to begin writing down your reflections in your assignments. Never forget that every word you write has the power to change lives and inspire others. So, write wisely!