Reflective Account

A Reflective Account is one of the records required for revalidation. It's a summary of your practice over the past year.

It encourages you to think about how you meet the GPhC’s Standards for Pharmacy Professionals in the work you do as a pharmacy professional. It should include specific examples of how you meet one or more of the GPhC's standards for pharmacy professionals and how your service users benefited as a result. 

Use this guide to find out more about completing your Reflective Account and passing Revalidation. Including what standards you need to reflect on, and how to write a reflective account. We have FAQs, videos, webinars, templates and examples to help you.

How to reflect

Your record should include an example(s) from the previous 12 months.

Our advice is to keep it concise and to the point. Focus on the quality as opposed to the word count, they don’t need to be essays.

Refection is personal and there are different ways you can reflect, below is one example. It’s important to reflect on both positive and negative experiences so you can develop as a professional.

There are several stages to reflection.

Describe the what, where and who

Think about the subject/situation in detail to help clarify events, actions, feelings, thoughts or beliefs. It is an opportunity to recapture an event or an example of an area of practice for the purposes which serves as a springboard for you to explore your practice i.e.

• What happened exactly and in what order?
• Where were you at the time and who else was involved?
• What part did you have to play?
• What was the final outcome?

Describe why things happened as they did

Consider intended and unintended consequences of the situation/area of practice – this assists with cause and effect – the ‘why’ aspect of practice or ‘so what?’

Could you have done anything differently?

In hindsight:

• How would you have managed the situation/area of practice differently?
• Is there anything you could have tried that may have improved the situation? or
• Was there anything you did that was particularly important in the situation?

It’s easy to remember the things that you didn’t do, and it’s often the things that you did do well that are not remembered.

What will you do differently in the future - how will this change your practice?

This is probably the most important stage in reflecting.

• List everything you have thought of before to learn and improve your practice for the benefit of your service-users
• Think about what you would do differently in that specific situation
• Think whether you have thought of any transferable knowledge or skills that you can use in similar situations.

See the following guides for examples of good and not so good reflective accounts.

• Reflective account for patient facing roles pdf
• Reflective account for non-patient facing roles pdf