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imagine staff will feel personally attacked and this will kill the potential
learning. Is lip service being given to the reflections by this process so that
staff may subconsciously be picking up ―going through the motions‖
without any real passion for the reflective processes themselves? Staff
must Reflect To Order or is it really ‗BY ORDER‘? No wonder there would
be a reluctance to share your private world especially with someone you
didn‘t trust. Interestingly the NHS organisations are called Trusts and how
ironic this is given the little trust I have observed whilst in practice or in
meetings with senior staff.
Over and over again staff felt unsupported by their managers, by not
paying attention to the emotions experienced by staff I believe nurses will
continue to feel used, unsupported and devalued. But why would I want to
share my vulnerability with others and expose my lack of knowledge if I
feel this is going to be used against me in the future? This is potentially
likely to be more so when all nurses are reviewed against the Knowledge
and Skills Framework competencies (DH 2004a). Of course staff mistrust
reflective practice; reflecting to order, whose interests is it serving?
Developing Political and Systemic Resilience: It’s a Waiting
Game
In the poem Just a Pair of Hands 50 I tried to capture the disempowerment
and anger at being regarded as just a pair of hands and later I will show
how this also translates into not being taken seriously when the
organisation could learn from nurses‘ reflections. Bradbury-Jones et al
(2007) noted students were often regarded as a ―pair of hands‖ and they
linked this to disempowerment in the ward whereby learning opportunities
were therefore lost. Nevertheless, this inquiry identified several structures
available to staff which could be used to facilitate reflection and thus
50 See list of poems for the page of this poem
204