Exploration of reflective capabilities within undergraduate physiotherapy students

A joint statement released by the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) states that reflection should be encouraged as it builds resilience, and improves well-being and quality of care (HCPC, 2019). In response the Reflective Practice Questionnaire (RPQ) was used to assess the reflective capability of physiotherapy students during their undergraduate training at the University of Liverpool (Priddis & Rogers, 2018). Comparisons were made across the three-year programme before discussing the results in relation to pedagogical activities that focus on enhancing reflective practice skills. Results show an increase in mean scores for a number of subscales, with the largest increase between year 1 and 2. Reflection-on-action and general confidence were increased from year 1 to 3 while stress and uncertainty were reduced from year 2 to 3. It was concluded that although reflective frameworks are popular, more social approaches may be beneficial to encourage reflection-in-action. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .