Geriatric Mental Health Disaster and Emergency Preparedness

108 Geriatric Mental Health Disaster and Emergency Preparedness
processes that will support and/or hinder the development and delivering
of client- and community-centered services, which are their primary task,
as well as identify those areas where they might be going off task.
Many teams can be perceived as powerful and intimidating because
of their extensive experience facing life-and-death situations and their
success in making a difference in people’s lives. This perception, in the authors’
experiences, can be effectively contained and may be used as an excellent
resource to inform practice when narratives are part of reflective
practice. The model outlined in the next section shows the parallel processes
demonstrated in team behavior and reflection when the practitioners
are away from the immediacy of responding to emergencies. In this
way, it is possible to allow team members to anticipate events and the manner
in which they might respond to them, as well as to enable them to learn
from previous experiences.
Reflective Practice
Reflective practice is defined as the capacity to review practice by
reflection-in-action-and-on-action (Schön, 1987) in order to gain new perspectives
and insights. Reflective practice as a means of examining past
actions in a structured manner is well documented. What is not so well
documented is the use of facilitated reflection to monitor and develop delivery
of services by organizations as well as individuals. However, reflective
practice as a means of establishing therapeutic direction is receiving
more attention now than it did when Max van Manen named it “anticipatory
reflection” in 1991 (as cited in Wilson, 2008, p. 180).
Facilitated reflective practice , the model the authors propose, has
been shown to have a beneficial effect upon practice. The model uses cofacilitated
reflective practice sessions as an integral part of the planning
process to specifically address the needs of client groups and workers. In
this mutual supervision model, reflection is used to convert previous experiences
into knowledge and insight. Practitioners are then assisted to
transform this new learning into sound practice. Their organizations, in
turn, change individual practice and insight into true interprofessional responses
focusing on survivors’ needs rather than delivering a service solely
prescribed and led by procedures. Through these processes, open systems
that make clear the parameters for service provision and provide clear
guidelines for practice within and across organizational boundaries can be
developed (Roberts, 1994).
Different professions that form an interprofessional team can have
different or even conflicting views of the primary task of the group. In or-