Within this assignment, I will be discussing professionalism, collaboration and teamwork, and professional communication within midwifery. I don't feel like the word count is high enough to reflect on the start of my journey as a student midwife. In this assignment, all organizations and individuals that have helped me develop my learning will be kept confidential and anonymous. I will be using Gibb's (1998) reflective model to help me reflect on this assignment as it is an effective model to explain and analyze different areas on which I can improve.
When completing a group project at the university on collaboration for individual and community wellbeing, I had to collaborate with other student healthcare professionals as a team to produce a presentation. The definition of teamwork is 'the combined actions of a group of people working together effectively to achieve a goal'. This is important because everyone within a team should have the same aims and goals to work towards together. For teamwork to be effective we needed to collaborate with my team to achieve the same goal which was completing and achieving a high goal for that assignment. From this experience, I felt like this was such a good learning opportunity to ally with different student health professionals. This is because when I am on placement and qualify as a midwife, I will be communicating daily with healthcare professionals such as doctors, healthcare assistants, and nurses. The benefits of this project were everyone within my group was willing to contribute to the presentation and was focused to achieve a high grade. This really benefited us as a team because we all had unique ideas and helped one another come up with ideas on how to improve our parts of the presentation. Collectively we all had strengths and weaknesses of our own but as we worked as a team someone else's weaknesses were someone else's strength. A strength was no one dominated the conversations we had with each other we all got to share our thoughts and feelings towards the presentation, and everyone was very respectful and listened to one another. It was helpful that we all had the same end goal which was getting a good grade on our assignment, and it was clear how we would achieve it by working together. In contrast, the negatives were it was difficult to plan to meet and discuss the presentation with everyone. This was because everyone had different schedules due to being of different courses, having different life responsibilities, and living in various areas. We were unable to meet at university and in person however, we used teams to stay in contact with each other. Due to internet connections and other reasons, this was difficult at some Microsoft Teams meetings. This experience was overall positive because my past experiences factored into the success of the group. I have excellent qualities which are vital for teamwork and collaboration, some of these are clear effective communication, and I am an active listener. The main reason for the overall success as a team was, we all had the same views as each other and we wanted to do whatever we could to achieve the end goal. I have learned from this situation that If I was to work with a team and we weren't clear on achieving the same goal or if members weren't interested in collaborating, I would struggle because crucial to have the same interests. In the future, I will always make sure I put my best efforts into collaborating with others because as a future midwife, this will result in service users getting the best possible care from myself and other health professionals if we can effectively collaborate.
From nine weeks of placement as a first-year student midwife, I have been able to apply the knowledge of theory I have learned and obtained and use it within my practice.