Reflective Practice beyond Pharmacy Education: A Move towards Interprofessional Reflective Practice

Dear Colleagues,

Reflective practice has been at the forefront of the literature since the 1900s. Originally utilized by professionals in healthcare education within their silos, the literature posits that engaging in reflective activities may enhance future practice by drawing on one’s previous experiences, viewing different perspectives, and challenging one’s own firmly held beliefs and assumptions in order to make better informed decisions and judgements.

However, healthcare professionals do not work in isolation in practice as collaboration with other practitioners is pivotal to effective and efficient patient care. Reflective practice within an interprofessional context serves to expand the viewpoints, perspectives, and expertise of anyone involved in clinical reasoning and clinical decision-making. This is particularly important for the pharmacy profession, as pharmacists’ roles and scope of practice are continually evolving and the move to integrate pharmacists in a diverse range of practice settings and complexities of practice is constantly gaining traction. Having the tools and strategies to critically think, problem solve, and engage reflectively in interprofessional education, learning, and practice has the potential to develop the pharmacist as a reflective practitioner and establish them as an irreplaceable member of the healthcare team.

Research has shown that reflective tools, such as reflective e-portfolios, online reflective blogs, reflective videos, novel reflective writing artificial intelligence tools, and more face-to-face reflective briefs/discussions prior, during, and after incidents, may be beneficial in producing a better practitioner. How the interprofessional approach can influence the type of reflective tool utilized and the outcome of future incidents and events remains unknown. Additionally, the notion of how different disciplines conceptualize reflective practice may lie at the core of our future understanding of this construct.

We invite you to share your approaches to embedding reflective practice strategies within a pharmacy or other healthcare profession curriculum and practice setting to enhance interprofessional collaboration and future practice. We hope to hear from those inspiring pharmacy practitioners, pharmacy students, pharmacy practice researchers, pharmacy academics, and educators from other interdisciplinary educational contexts who communicate and collaborate with pharmacists on their clinical decision-making.

Dr. Cherie Lucas
Dr. Efi Mantzourani
Guest Editors

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• reflective practice
• clinical decision-making
• pharmacy education
• interprofessional collaboration
• reflective practice strategies