Engage in Personal Development in Health free essay sample

Giving showers to patients and doing other tasks related to personal care in general, such as changing pads or helping those less independent to go to a toilet. ? Providing breakfasts, lunches and other meals ? Helping disabled patients in their mobility ? Escorting them to appointments or even family meetings ? Making patients comfortable ? Keeping patient records ? Administering treatments to patients 2. Explain expectations about our work role as expressed in relevant standards. Our job is basically related to a job description, but while that tells us what we need to do, it does not usually tell us how we need to do it. To find that out, we need to look at the Standards that apply to own work. Standards, as with Codes of Practice, will vary depending on the UK country in which we work. Each UK country has National Minimum Standards that are used by inspectors to ensure that services are being delivered at an acceptable level. Finally, and most importantly in terms of how we carry out our work, there are the National Occupational Standards (NOS). These apply across the whole UK, and explain what we need to know and be able to do in order to work effectively in social care. It is important to understand that competence is not only about doing the job; it is also about understanding why we do what we do and the theoretical basis that support the work. 2. 1 Explain the importance of reflective practice in continuously improving the quality of service provided. The social healthcare sector is one which constantly changes and moves on. New Standards reflect the changes in the profession, such as the emphasis on personalised, quality services. Developments in technology have made huge strides towards independence for many people, thus promoting a changing relationship with support workers. We must be prepared to be active in maintaining your own knowledge base and to ensure that your practice is in line with current thinking and new theories. The best way to do this is to incorporate an awareness of the need to update your knowledge constantly into all of our work activities. 2. 2 Demonstrate the ability to reflect on practice. Everything you do at work is part of a process of learning. Even regular tasks are likely to be vital for learning because there are often some new factors which are unpredictable. Everyone makes mistakes, and they are basically one of ways of learning process. One of the formal ways of reflecting our own practice and identifying strengths, weaknesses and areas for development is during training opportunities. On a course, or at a training day, aspects of ours practice and areas of knowledge that are new to us will be discussed, and this will often open up avenues that we had not previously considered. This is one of the major benefits of making the most of all the training and education opportunities that are available to us. 4. 3 Demonstrate how to work with others to agree own personal development plan. A personal development plan is a very important document, as it identifies your training and development needs. Because the plan is updated when we have taken part in training and development, it also provides a record of participation. We should work out a personal development plan with our supervisor. Remember that it is essentially our plan for our career. There are plenty of different models and styles; what matters is what is in the plan. It may include: ? different development areas, such as practical skills and communication skills ? the goals or targets you have set – such as learning to manage a team ? timescale for achieving these goals or targets. 5. 1 Evaluate how learning activities have affected practice. After we had identified skills and knowledge we would like to improve or just gain, the next step should be setting about learning. There are many theories about how people learn, and being able to understand how we learn is often helpful to the process of learn ing. A useful theory is the Lewin/Kolb cycle of experiential learning. 5. 2 Demonstrate how reflective practice has led to improved ways of working. The purpose of reflective practice is to improve and develop our practice by thinking about what we are doing. Reflection involves taking time to consider how we are working and why we are doing things in a particular way. Thinking and reflecting is like any other skill – we can learn it, and you can practise it until you become very good at it. Becoming a reflective practitioner means thinking not only about your actions, but also about the people you support. Learning from our own experience will help us to understand people better because it force us to wonder about why people behave in particular ways and what kind of messages the behaviour is trying to convey. Spending time reflecting on the people we support will ultimately mean that we have a greater understanding about them and thus provide a better service 5. 3 Show how to record progress in relation to personal development. This is a personal development programme for us and we must be sure that it reflects not only the purposes of your organisation and the job roles they may want us to fulfil, but also our personal ambitions and aspirations. After we have identified the areas in which we feel competent and after we have chosen your target areas for development, we will need to design a personal development records of our progress. This can be run in any way that you find effective. In our plan, we may wish to include things such as: ? learning sign language ? learning a particular technique for working with people with dementia ? developing your potential as a manager by learning organisational and human resources skills. We could also include areas such as time management or stress management. All of them legitimate areas for inclusion in your personal and professional development plan.