NR 222 Week 8 End of Course Reflection Paper Example

Reflection: My Recommendations This Term Kept Spending Someone Else's Time, and the Question I Now Ask Before Writing One

Student Name

College of Nursing, Chamberlain University

NR 222: Health and Wellness

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Reflection: My Recommendations This Term Kept Spending Someone Else's Time, and the Question I Now Ask Before Writing One

The Claim

Looking back over the papers I wrote in this course, I see a pattern I did not notice while writing them. My recommendations were specific, dated and assigned to people, as the assignments asked. But several of them quietly spent a resource that belonged to someone else, usually time or money, without my having asked whether that person could spare it. The recommendations looked practical on paper because I had written the owner's name next to them. Writing a name next to a task is not the same as finding out whether that person can do it.

Evidence From Named Papers

Week 3, the family assessment. I recommended that Marcus, the father, take over two of the weekday school pickups so that his mother-in-law would not have to do all five. In my first draft, I wrote this as a simple scheduling choice. When I took the draft back to the family, Marcus said he could do it only by trading for extra on-call weekends, which cost him weekends with his children. The final paper recorded the arrangement in one clause, "in exchange for on-call cover," and moved on. I had not weighed that cost; I had only written it down.

Week 2, my own wellness self-assessment. My goal was to stop using my phone after closing shifts so I would sleep sooner. I wrote it as a matter of willpower. I did not account for the fact that the phone is how I talk to my partner after a closing shift, because he is asleep by the time I get home and we text on my break. The goal was specific and checkable, and it spent a part of my relationship I had not counted.

Week 6, the resource brief. My fit sentence for the Eldercare Locator suggested that Loretta's daughter make the first call with her. That sentence assigned a task to a woman who works three night shifts a week and sleeps in the afternoons. I did not ask her whether she had time for it.

The Correction, With a Reason

If I wrote the family assessment again, I would bring the recommendation to Marcus as a question before writing it: "If Loretta stopped picking Ava up two days a week, how could those days be covered?" His answer, one day with a trade-off, would have gone into the paper as the family's own solution rather than as my recommendation corrected after the fact.

The reason this was not obvious at the time is that the assignments rewarded specificity, and I mistook specificity for feasibility. A recommendation that says "Marcus will leave at 1500 on Tuesdays" sounds more serious than one that says "the family should share the pickups," and I think I chose it partly for that reason. But a specific recommendation that the person cannot carry out is worse than a vague one, because it looks as if it has been solved.

Huber et al. (2011) suggested that health be judged by how well people adapt and manage for themselves. I used that definition in my first discussion post about Luis. Rereading it now, I notice that it applies to my recommendations too: a plan that a person cannot adapt to their real week does not support their health, however well it is written.

A Second Thread: Whose Knowledge Counted

A second pattern runs alongside the first. In the Week 4 cultural assessment, I arrived at the Tesfaye family's apartment with a two-page overview of health practices in Ethiopia already in my notes, and my first draft of questions was built from it. The summary predicted that the family would rely on traditional remedies instead of medicines and that the eldest man would make decisions for everyone. Neither was true for this family. The paper that resulted was better than my draft because I let the family's answers replace the summary's predictions, but I noticed afterward that I had spent the first visit checking my reading against them rather than simply asking.

This is related to the first pattern. In both cases, I treated my own preparation, whether a summary of a culture or a neat schedule for a family, as the starting point, and the people involved as the check on it. The better order is the reverse: the person's account first, and my preparation as a source of questions to ask them. In the Week 4 paper, the most important finding, that Ato Bekele had twice become confused on fast days and never told his doctor, came from a question the summary did not suggest. It came from asking Dawit what worried him.

The Question Now Asked Earlier

The question I now ask before writing a recommendation is: whose time, money or energy does this spend, and have I asked them? I asked it for the first time while planning the Week 7 project, and it changed the plan. My first idea was for the crew to keep a sleep diary for four weeks. Asked whether they would, they said no, it was one more thing after a long night. The evaluation became a count of energy drinks in the trash and dark kit rolls taken, which spends Luis's time and the night lead's, both of whom I asked first. That plan measures less than a diary would, but it will actually be carried out.

Asking cost me something too: the diary would have produced a cleaner measure, and I had to accept a weaker one.

Generalizing Only as Far as Permitted

These four papers support a narrow conclusion, and I want to keep it narrow. They show that I have a habit of assigning resources I do not own, and that asking the owner first improves the plan. They do not show that every recommendation should be negotiated with every person it touches, which would make some plans impossible to write, nor that people always know what they can manage. Luis's crew first said they would not change their caffeine habits, and four of the nine then chose to. What I can say is narrower: before I write a person's name next to a task, I will ask that person what it would cost them.

References

Huber, M., Knottnerus, J. A., Green, L., van der Horst, H., Jadad, A. R., Kromhout, D., Leonard, B., Lorig, K., Loureiro, M. I., van der Meer, J. W. M., Schnabel, P., Smith, R., van Weel, C., & Smid, H. (2011). How should we define health? BMJ, 343, Article d4163. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.d4163