Читать книгу Preparing for Professional Practice in Health and Social Care - Группа авторов - Страница 8

This chapter discusses the mechanisms Allied Health Professionals (AHPs) use to assess the relevance of knowledge to their practice. The Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC), in their standards of proficiency for regulated AHPs (HCPC 2013a, 2013b, 2014, 2018), demand that they are able to demonstrate that they can critically reflect on practice, as well as being able to draw on relevant information to guide practice.

What is professionalism? How does professionalism relate to the practice knowledge healthcare workers need? What are the ways in which these workers use their professional knowledge to come to decisions about what they do? These are complex but important questions. It will be helpful to locate them within commonly used terms about knowledge and healthcare. Firstly, professionalism will be defined and its relationship to the knowledge a healthcare worker needs and uses. Common terms used to reflect how AHPs deal with this knowledge are ‘evidence-based practice (EBP)’ or ‘clinical reasoning’, so both of these terms will need some explanation. Finally, this chapter will make the case for reflective practice as a cornerstone of professionalism, EBP, and clinical reasoning.