Assessment One – Portfolio/Ongoing Reflective Journal

Weighting: 40%

Word Count: N/A

Due Date: 5 June 2020 (Week 12)

Reflective practice is listed as one of the key domains that make up the National Competency Standards for the Midwife. It is through reflective processes that both students and registered midwives can identify and explore diverse values, beliefs, learning needs and sociocultural structures.

To facilitate your reflective skill development, you are required to complete a reflective piece of writing for a minimum of 10 continuity of care cases, including each of the four (4) newly recruited women from term three (3).

By week 12 you need to have completed 10 comprehensive reflective journals that include a minimum of:

- 4 antenatal visits

- labour/intrapartum care of at least 6 women

- 2 postnatal visits

- You must have spent a minimum of 10 hours with each woman.

Please upload your minimum of 10 completed journals to the Bachelor of Midwifery (Graduate Entry) meta page

Overview of Reflective Journal Writing

A reflective journal is a way of thinking in a critical and analytical way about your clinical experience. It involves looking at a situation, assessing what you have learnt from it, what you could have done differently, realising new approaches to your care and ultimately, how you felt about the whole experience. As a student midwife it shows how different aspects of your work interconnect and can be very useful for identifying gaps in knowledge and ethical dilemmas or situations that need further thought.

Understanding your feelings is a vital skill for reflective writing, and studying midwifery involves being exposed to a lot of new situations - doing your first antenatal booking; helping a woman with breastfeeding support; witnessing a birth - which can bring new reactions to the surface. It's important to comprehend what you feel, why you feel that way and to then learn from it, as failing to reflect can lead to poor insight and therefore poor performance in practice (Hays & Gay, 2011).

*Reflective writing is more personal than other kinds of academic writing and is an exploration of events not just a description of them.

Reflective Journal Requirements

(Refer to the provided Reflective Journal Template and the Two Reflective Journal examples)

How to structure reflective writing

It can be useful to use a reflective model, or series of questions, which will help you look at the whole event from many different angles (Macdonald, 2011; Driscoll, 1994; Benner, 1984). The Driscoll model has a very simple 'what', 'so what' and 'now what' model, which is easy to remember and write up. There are three common reflective writing models that you may choose to follow when writing reflectively: Van Manen, Gibbs and Durgahee (Giminez, 2011). The models all involve thinking systematically about the phases of an activity, using headings including description, feelings, evaluation, analysis, conclusion and action plan. These theoretical frameworks provide a starting point for the critical skills that all student midwives should develop by the end of their educational program.

Example:

1. Description: (don't make this too long - refer to the provided template)

What is it? What happened? Why am I talking about it?

2. Interpretation: What is important and relevant? Look through your description and try to find words or phrases that require further exploration. Include the rationale for what was done or why it was done. Where there is controversy about what was done or found, provide the rationale and sources of evidence for both sides of the argument. How can it be explored and explained using contemporary theories?

3. Outcome: What have I learned from this? How will it influence my future work?

Above all, enjoy writing the journal - it is about you and your reflection and your development as a clinical midwife!

Assessment 2 – Written Assessment and Presentation

Weighting: 60%

Word Count: 2500 words +/- 10%

Assessment Due Date

Week 10 Monday the 18th of May 2020 6.00 p.m. AEST

The word count is considered from the first word of the introduction to the last word of the conclusion. It excludes the cover page, abstract, contents page, reference page and appendices. It includes in-text references and direct quotations. Students are expected to write this assignment in an essay format. Your essay is to follow academic conventions of structure with an introduction, body and conclusion.

Learning Outcomes

This assessment relates to these Learning Outcomes:

Learning outcome 1: Demonstrate safe and effective midwifery care at the level of a competent beginning midwife.

Learning outcome 2: Reflect on clinical learning and midwifery practice.

Assessment Task

In this assessment, you are required to examine a Coroner’s Report. This Report is from December 2014 and relates to the case of Baby A. Baby A and his mother were under the intrapartum care of maternity health services at a Gold Coast private hospital, and, according to the facts before the coroner, Baby A died as a result of hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy due to meconium aspiration syndrome.

In this assessment you are asked to follow the pregnancy and intrapartum journey provided in the report, examine what occurred, and perhaps most importantly, provide alternative midwifery actions that may have led to a different outcome. These actions may include multidisciplinary collaboration and communication, maternal and foetal assessment, provision of evidence based care, education, advocacy for the mother and foetus, and partner involvement.

As part of this assignment you are expected to review current (5 years) peer reviewed evidence, policy and guidelines on water immersion and water birth, identify the benefits, prohibitors and risk factors for water immersion and water birth. It is also expected that you will identify early warning signs of maternal and foetal deterioration during pregnancy and labour and discuss clinical midwifery interventions to mitigate this.

Assessment details:

Part 1: Written component.

1. Download the Coroner’s report.

2. Utilising a timeline of the labour and considering antenatal events, highlight the critical areas where you consider the intrapartum care was not evidence based. Identify critical intrapartum incidents where effective communication and clinical midwifery intervention would have been appropriate. Outline what appropriate midwifery interventions would be at that critical point in the timeline and how you as a practising registered midwife would have intervened. You will need to support your argument with appropriate current evidence.

3. Utilising current (last 5 years) literature provide an overview of the appropriate use of water immersion and water birth. The discussion should include the benefits and risks relating to the use of water immersion during labour and water birth. Include this information in your assessment piece.

Part 2 Audio-visual component

1. Provide a video of yourself undertaking a ten-minute talk that could be used for education with colleagues at a Grand Round. You may use visual aids such as a PowerPoint presentation to assist with your delivery of this talk. Base your talk on this Coroner’s Report and the salient learnings from this for registered midwives. Your talk should be approximately ten minutes long but no longer than 15 minutes. It should include the timeline, what in your opinion went wrong and how to prevent a tragedy like Baby A’s death from re-occurring in the future, viewed from a midwifery perspective and using current evidence. In essence this is a summarisation of Part 1.

Tips and resources on how to upload your talk will be made available on your Moodle site and in an assignment guide. An audio-only exemplar is provided on the Moodle page.

Referencing Style: American Psychological Association (APA)

Submission: Online 

Submission Instructions: Submit via the Moodle link.

Learning Outcomes Assessed

1: Demonstrate safe and effective midwifery care at the level of a competent beginning midwife.

2: Reflect on clinical learning and midwifery practice.

Graduate Attributes

• Knowledge

• Communication

• Cognitive, technical and creative skills

• Research

• Self-management

• Ethical and Professional Responsibility and Accountability

• Leadership

• Professional Development

Assessment 3 - Clinical Practice Placement

Due Date: 12 June 2020 (week 13)

Weighting: 0% - Pass/Fail

This assessment relates to learning outcomes one (1), two (2) and three (3)

Minimal clinical practice experience of 224 hours (term 4) is required by completion of this course*. This clinical experience will allow you to consolidate knowledge and skills acquired throughout the course. You are required to meet the clinical requirements listed below and these requirements need to be documented within your Student Clinical Experience Record Book.

You are expected to work towards the minimum clinical requirements which are:

Complete the four (4) ‘Continuity of Care (CoC) experience women recruited in term 3. By week 13 you must have completed and submitted 10 comprehensive reflective journals that include a minimum of:

• 4 antenatal visits

• labour/intrapartum care of at least 6 women

• 2 postnatal visits

Completed Competency Assessment Tool (CAT).

Complete 224 hours of clinical practice in experience plus continuity of care hours (10-20 in total per woman recruited) in term 4.

*As this is the completion of the entire course, in total, all students must have completed a grand total of a minimum of 896 clinical hours plus a minimum of 100 CoC hours and have been signed off as competent throughout the term 4 CAT.

The required clinical experience will be reviewed by the midwifery educator/manager and /or clinical facilitator at your clinical placement facility in conjunction with the unit coordinator.

This is a pass/fail assessment and as such no marking criteria are applied to this assessment.