Development of the Newcastle Reflective Analysis Tool

The need for health professionals to reflect on practice and incorporate reflection into their life long learning repertoire is not new. Many health professional programs at Universities use journaling as a tool to facilitate, encourage and foster insightful and reflective thinking, with an aim to develop future health professionals with skills to become reflective practitioners in the workplace. During their professional placements, undergraduate radiation therapy (RT) students at the University of Newcastle, Australia, write a personal development journal, describing their journey from novice to graduate practitioner. The full three year set of journals from one intake of students have been subjected to both qualitative descriptive analysis to describe the professional practice situations that students report on, and reflective analysis to describe the evidence of reflection. This paper focuses on the development of the Newcastle Reflective Analysis Tool (NRAT) to analyse the journals for evidence of reflection. Deep analytic and broad classification tools are described as methods that can be used to asses student reflective writing for levels of reflectivity.