Know yourself first, then reflect on your work
Hilary Orpet
"Think about your journey here today," said Hilary Orpet from the RVC, London, introducing her presentation on 'The Reflective Practitioner' at the BVNA Congress in Telford. "We need to know ourselves before we can reflect on our work."
This self awareness is often best achieved by taking time out alone – maybe driving home after a lecture or walking the dog. The aim of the process is to identify your personal values.
Once you have done this, you are better able to reflect on wider issues and to become a reflective practitioner. We are meant to learn from our experiences, especially our mistakes. "Then we can, perhaps, change things to do them even better," said Hilary.
Nowhere is reflective practice more important than during veterinary nurse training or following CPD courses, as we are challenged to transfer theory into practice. In order to do this, we may need the facilitation of a 'preceptor'.
The three most useful tools for the reflective practitioner are:
• guided reflection with a mentor
• a reflective diary or a blog
• critical incident analysis.
Reflection on the things that we do intuitively is difficult. It helps, however, to divide the process into the two components of 'reflect-on-action' which is retrospective in nature, and 'reflect-in-action' which is thinking on your feet.
"As professionals, we need to be able to justify our decisions," concluded Hilary. "That is a major reason for adopting reflective practice and it is a natural introduction to 'outcome-based CPD."
The BSAVA has opened submissions for the BSAVA Clinical Research Abstracts 2026.
