A Reflective Account of a Teaching Session about Changing a Stoma Essay

A Reflective Account of a Teaching Session about Changing a Stoma - Essay Example It is thus important that on my part, I analyse my approach in teaching to determine its effectiveness, strengths, weaknesses and what I should do to make it better. The best approach to examine my approach to teaching is definitely through the use of Gibb’s reflective cycle as it will enable me to reflect a great deal in using one situation and analyse everything that occurred in it, relating my actions to each result that occurred. Through Gibb’s Reflective Cycle, I will analyse a case in which I taught a patient how to change a stoma. I will first describe the context of the teaching- how I acted and how the patient reacted. According to Jasper (2003) this should be followed by analysing ones feelings in the situation and emotions at the event. One then follows this up with an evaluation of the experience, determining which aspects turned out to be positive and which ones were not, and what failed to go according to plan. After this one needs to critically analyse th e occurrence, establishing a conclusion on the entire experience and ultimately come up with an action plan to follow in case of a similar experience in the future. By the time I am through with this, the teaching experience will be analysed in entirety and the next patient I teach how to change a stoma will have a better experience. The context of the teaching This is the first step of Gibb’s Reflective cycle, where I will analyse what actually happened as I taught the patient how to change the stoma. To begin with, the patient had undergone a surgery to due to a severe case of diverticulitis and was just about to be discharged. I visited her ward as was required of me and undertook to explain to her how from that moment henceforth she would be changing the stoma. The patient was clearly in anxious emotional state due to the surgery she had just undergone, although it had been very successful. As Winston et al (1987) so ably puts it, the pre-operative and post-operative emot ional states of surgery patients is characterised by anxiety, misgivings, depression and irritability. Spielberger (1973) had earlier on suggested that patients usually develop anxiety to surgery as an emotional reaction towards situations that physically threatening, while Furst (1978) demonstrated that patients under surgery usually reported fear, apprehension, worry and uncertainty. All this serve to explain the emotional status of my patient as at the time I was teaching her. I realise that even before I had started, she was in a state that would make it difficult to absorb what I was saying. I first explained briefly to the patient the procedure she had just gone through- the surgery, and a little about diverticulitis and stomas since I assumed she already had been informed. I told her that diverticulitis was a condition arising from inflamed pouches on her large intestines known as diverticula, and also informed her that it was not a rare condition since about 10% of Americans above the age of 40 have diverticula and of these, ten out of twenty five develop diverticulitis (Borgadus, 2006). On the stoma, I told her that it was a surgical bypass of her colon system which had been affected by the diverticulitis and now failed to function properly. I informed her that the colostomy meant that she had to have a bag for receiving fecal matter a single time (Stoma and Stomata, 2009). I could see that she was embarrassed by her condition and the life that she would lead from that henceforth. I then took the patient through the steps of changing a stoma. I used knowledge of the Honey and Mumford teaching and learning style to determine which kind of learner she was. The Honey and Mumford teaching and learning style identifies four distinct preferences of learning styles,