The potential of the professional portfolio for nursing

Professional profiles and portfolios have recently been identified by nursing's regulatory bodies in the UK as ways of recording each nurse's career and professional development. Although the use of portfolios is widespread in education, the concept of a developmental portfolio to support continuing professional development on an individual basis is recent. As an innovation in nursing the portfolio is to be used for periodic registration with the UK Central Council (UKCC), for the on-going recording of learning, both formal and experiential, and as a way of accrediting prior learning for academic purposes. This paper argues that the potential of the portfolio is wider than the purposes already identified in that the knowledge generated from experiential learning and identified by reflective practice is of specific interest and value to the nursing profession as a whole. In particular portfolios are likely to record the knowledge embedded in practice, which is often hard to describe, yet represents nursing's expertise. For this potential to be realized pragmatic issues such as finance, time and verification of experiences need to be addressed, and an infrastructure created to support the nurse compiling the profile.