Enhancing Professionality Through Reflectivity in Social and Health Care

Book excerpt: This book discusses complex motivational conditions and strategies on macro, meso, and micro levels promoting reflectivity in interpersonal professional practice. The increasing demands made on practitioners in social and health services, as illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic, can lead to great uncertainty over how to find "the right response" to complex expressions of need and how to account for ethical professional decisions in view of prevailing strategies of 'risk reduction' and managerial accounting. Reflectivity has been recognised as being of central importance for guiding practitioners towards situationally differentiated and accountable practice. However, it is a complex process made up not only of different psychological components and their interplay with educational and organisational contexts, but also of multilevel interactions and purely situational conditions that can have positive or negative effects. The individual and team reflectivity can be learned and supported through various educational and managerial opportunities, sensitively guided personal and professional experiences and specific patterns of interaction which are reviewed in the book. Reflective supervision in the workplace plays a pivotal role in enabling individual and team reflective processes. However, there are also social and organisational factors that can hinder the development of individual and team reflectivity. The particular value of this publication is that the authors focus on complex research findings from several consecutive studies and critically review and discuss the conditions for reflectivity from various perspectives and with the background of rich academic literature and research. Their research-derived empirical and analytical insights were submitted to managers and educators, and effective and realistic strategies and methods to enhance different levels of reflectivity in students and practitioners were discussed and are summarised in this volume. Among the topics covered: The significance of reflectivity in professional social and health care in relation to changing socio-political contexts Gender aspects of reflectivity in the social and healthcare field Operationalisation of reflectivity for research by personal, team and organisational scales Cultural and communicational patterns of interaction enabling professional reflective processes Enhancing Professionality Through Reflectivity in Social and Health Care is pertinent reading for professors of professional academic training programmes for social workers, nurses, supervisors, trainers in non-formal learning settings, students, and managers of social and health services with an interest in enhancing organisational cultures.