Critically reflective practice and its sources: A qualitative exploration

Critical reflection may improve health professionals' performance of the social roles of care (eg collaboration) in indeterminate zones of practice that are ambiguous, unique, unstable or value-conflicted. Research must explore critical reflection in practice and how it is developed. In this study, we explored what critical reflection consisted of in a context known for indeterminacy, and to what sources participants attributed their critically reflective insights and approaches.

The study context was the interface between health care and education for children with chronic conditions or disabilities necessitating health-related recommendations and supports (eg accommodations or equipment) at school. We conducted a secondary analysis of 42 interview transcripts from an institutional ethnographic study involving health professionals, school-based educators and parents of children with chronic conditions or disabilities. We coded all transcripts for instances of critical reflection, moments that seemed to lack but could benefit from critical reflection, and participant-attributed sources of critically reflective insights.

Critically reflective practice involved getting to know the other, valuing and leveraging different forms and sources of knowledge, identifying and communicating workarounds (ie strategies to circumvent imperfect systems), seeing inequities, and advocating as collaborators, not adversaries. Participants invariably attributed critically reflective insights to personal experiences such as former careers or close personal relationships.

This study shows that personal experiences and connections inspire critically reflective views, and that being critically reflective is not a binary trait possessed (or not) by individuals. It is learnable through personally meaningful experiences. Health professions education could aim to preserve philosophical space for personal experience as a source of learning and integrate evidence-informed approaches to foster critically reflective practice.