Reflective Essay on Interpersonal Skills

In this assignment, I need to reflect on the situation that taken place duringmy clinical placement to develop and utilise my interpersonal skills in order tomaintain the therapeutic relationships with my patient. In this reflection, I amgoing to use Gibbs (1988) Reflective Cycle. This model is a recognisedframework for my reflection. Gibbs (1988) consists of six stages to complete onecycle which is able to improve my nursing practice continuously and learningfrom the experience for better practice in the future. The cycle starts with adescription of the situation, next is to analysis of the feelings, third is anevaluation of the experience, fourth stage is an analysis to make sense of theexperience, fifth stage is a conclusion of what else could I have done and finalstage is an action plan to prepare if the situation arose again (NHS, 2006). Bairdand Winter (2005, p.156) give some reasons why reflection is require in thereflective practice. They state that a reflect is to generate the practice knowledge,assist an ability to adapt new situations, develop self-esteem and satisfaction aswell as to value, develop and professionalizing practice. However, Siviter (2004,p.165) explain that reflection is about gaining self-confidence, identify when toimprove, learning from own mistakes and behaviour, looking at other peopleperspectives, being self-aware and improving the future by learning the past.In my context with the patient, it is important for me to improve thetherapeutic relationship which is the nurse-patient relationship. In the therapeuticrelationship, there is the therapeutic rapport establish from a sense of trust and amutual understanding exists between a nurse and a patient that build in a special

verbal so that the message could be understood and do not break the nurse-patient communication. In my opinion, I evaluated that it does not a matter whether it was a patient-centred communication or task-centred communicationbecause both communication