The self critical doctor: helping students become more reflective

Whether or not “experience” means “making the same mistakes with increasing confidence over an impressive number of years”1 depends on how self analytical and critical you are. When you speak of your students needing to be “more reflective” you mean they should let their future behaviour be guided by systematic and critical evaluation and analysis of actions and beliefs and the assumptions that underlie them.2 All UK doctors are now expected to make reflection a critical foundation of their lifelong learning3 on the assumption that patients will benefit.4 This emphasis on reflective learning in medical education is relatively new, and certainly no hard evidence exists yet that patients benefit directly from doctors’ reflective learning.5

However, evidence suggests that reflection could help students to learn from their experiences. A study in postgraduate medical education found that reflection plays a vital role in helping junior doctors to learn from clinical experiences.6 Acquiring reflective learning skills helped undergraduate medical students to identify their learning needs and stimulated learning that focused on comprehension and understanding.7 Research in the fields of expertise development,8 nurse training, …