The lived experience of those impacted by their own cancer diagnosis provides a valuable resource and expertise that can be used in the education of healthcare students. For students, the use of reflective practices is commonly used throughout education to enhance student learning following clinical placements or engaging with various patient populations. What is not currently understood is how such practices are influencing students when used following engagement with those impacted by cancer. This scoping review explored how reflection practices have been utilised by healthcare students after engaging with a person of a lived experience of cancer, and the impact of those reflective exercises.
Eligible publications included tertiary level healthcare students in a discipline that may be involved within the cancer landscape and undertook some degree of reflection or reflexivity following engagement with a person of a lived experience of cancer in the clinical or education setting. Sources included published works and gray literature, but only those written in English.
The scoping review method set out by the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) was adopted along with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR). Database searches included MEDLINE, Emcare, Scopus, CINAHL, PsycINFO and ERIC (ProQuest). Results are presented by way of narrative synthesis. 11,814 studies were screened, with 42 papers undergoing full-text review and 19 papers being included in the review.
Findings supported that patient interaction coupled with reflective practices, benefited students. It assisted in developing empathy, understanding the patients' perspectives, and facilitated emotional resilience, leading to improved attitudes toward patient-centred care. More research is needed that utilises established theoretical frameworks in reflective practices, couples outcome measures with quantitative findings, and exploration of how learning from lived experience in the clinical setting compares to the classroom setting.