Clinical Skill - Blood Pressure

2837 Words12 Pages
Select one clinical skill in which you are developing competence in and reflect upon how you have achieved the necessary level of competence for this stage in the programme. This essay will discuss a clinical skill that I have become competent in practising. I will discuss what a clinical skill involves and use a reflective model to discuss where I am within my midwifery training. The reflective model I have chosen is Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) which describes five levels of a skill: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient and expert. Benner (1984) describes how the student initially learns skills as a series of steps and states that a student acquires some experience of the clinical area and that they should be able to see the ‘whole’ picture before they can effectively achieve the competence. The clinical skill I have chosen to reflect on within this essay is blood pressure. Before starting my midwifery training I worked as a healthcare assistant within a medical practice for eighteen years, taking blood pressure was a vast part of my role. Although I always felt competent in taking a blood pressure and had some knowledge and understanding of the theory related, I would suggest my knowledge of the cardiovascular system was very basic. According to Coni and Coni (2003) in order to understand blood pressure, it is important to have knowledge and understanding of the circulatory system. Coni and Coni (2003) suggest that without this knowledge and understanding the practitioner may never understand the theory behind blood pressure management. As a midwifery student, I will discuss why blood pressure management is important during the antenatal, intrapartum and postnatal period, along with relevant guidelines that implement the importance of blood pressure management for the health and wellbeing of the women and her fetus. I will discuss what
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