SECTION 3
TASK 1

You are going to be a mentor for a new social care worker as part of their induction process. Part of your role is to help them prepare for the review after their probation period.

1. Create a guide for the new social care worker about how to reflect on their practice. The guide must include the headings listed with an explanation for each.

a) What is reflective practice? b) Why is reflective practice important? c) How reflective practice contributes to improving the quality of service provision. d) How standards can be used to help social care workers reflect on their practice.

Reflective practice is the process of looking back on the work I have previously done. Getting a better understanding of myself, how I work, my thoughts feelings and anything I can learn from the experience. Reflective practice is a process which enables you to achieve a better understanding of yourself, your skills, competencies, knowledge and professional practice.
Reflective practice is the process of thinking about and critically analysing your actions with the goal of changing and improving occupational practice.

Reflective practice is important as it enables you to achieve a better understanding of yourself, your skills, competencies, knowledge and professional practice. Identifying what you have learnt requires you to think about your experiences, and consider the outcomes, in order to evaluate the experience, and identify your thoughts, feelings and understanding of the relevant issues.
It will help improve the quality of care I can deliver. It will give me an awareness of my own personal thoughts and feelings. Professional development will improve and I will be able to learn from any mistakes I might make.

Reflective practice contributes to improving the quality of service provision as the care sector constantly revises policies and procedures and new standards are constantly being set. Care workers are to keep up to date on any revision of policies, procedures and standards to enable them to do their job to the quality expected of them.

I will be aware of what works for certain client groups; I will gain the knowledge of what could be added or taken away in order to provide an individual package of care. It can help me think about how I work, what I’ve done well and what I can be do to improve things in the future.

Standards help social care workers so they work in the same level as other social care workers or even their peers! It helps standardised the service they are giving. By having a standard, they can always reflect with it and achieve the same standardised level. You need to know the standards to understand what is expected of you as a health and social care worker, and then you should reflect to ensure you are meeting these standards, these would be the CQC ESQS and your code of practice which are found in the managers office and in each staff office. All codes of practice should be adhered to at all times I familiarise myself with the Company working standards. I can then reflect regularly on them so that I know I am meeting the standards of practice. Addaction offer booklets on the safe guarding of adults and also safe guarding of children.
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2. You arrange a mentor meeting to feed back to the social care worker. You have comments to make which include both praise and constructive criticism.

Everyone expects inspiration and progression within their service provision. And it is only possible when they obtain comments or feedback from service users, their families, colleagues, manager and all other professionals. Social workers are constantly required to give feedback, both to colleagues and to service users and also seek from colleagues and service users and their families. One way of approaching this is to reflect on your own experiences of getting feedback, and what makes it possible to ‘hear’ or not.

Why it is important for a care worker to seek to obtain feedback?
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