Reflective Journal: Cultural Healing Practices
& Patient Perspectives
How to write a 2–3 page reflective journal on cultural healing practices and patient perspectives — the right reflective model, the frameworks that actually matter, what to write in each section, and the errors that cost marks. No filler, just the practical stuff.
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A reflective journal on cultural healing practices and patient perspectives is not a report on traditional medicine or a survey of global health customs. It is a first-person critical examination of how your encounter with culturally specific approaches to healing — whether through a clinical placement, a case study, a patient conversation, or an educational experience — affected your understanding of patient-centred care and your own professional assumptions. The word count is tight: 2–3 pages double spaced. That is roughly 500–750 words of actual content. Every sentence has to work.
The key word in the assignment title is reflective. A lot of students write what is essentially a factual account of a cultural practice — what cupping therapy involves, how traditional Chinese medicine works, what Ayurveda prescribes — and then wonder why they lose marks. That’s description. Reflection is something different. It asks: what happened, how did it affect you, what did it reveal about your assumptions, what does it mean for how you practise?
The second key phrase is patient perspectives. The assignment is not just asking you to think about cultural healing practices as external phenomena. It is asking you to think about them through the lens of patient experience — what it means to a patient when their cultural healing beliefs are acknowledged or dismissed, and what the nurse’s role is in that moment.
A Specific Moment
Ground the reflection in one concrete experience or learning encounter — not a general overview of cultural competence.
A Theoretical Frame
Apply one or two cultural competence frameworks to make sense of what happened and what it means for practice.
The Patient’s View
Centre patient perspectives — what the practice meant to them, not just what it looked like from the outside.
Your Development
End with what you’ll do differently. A concrete, specific action plan — not “I will be more culturally aware.”
Real Experience vs. Hypothetical Scenario
If you have not had a direct clinical encounter involving cultural healing practices, you have options. You can reflect on a case study presented in class, a reading that challenged your assumptions, a community health scenario you observed, or a conversation with a patient, family member, or colleague about their cultural health beliefs. The source of the experience matters less than the depth of the reflection. What your markers want to see is genuine critical engagement with your own assumptions — not a polished performance of cultural sensitivity you haven’t actually developed yet.
Choosing the Right Reflective Model
Your assignment brief may specify a model. If it does, use it — no exceptions. If it doesn’t, the choice is yours, and here is how to pick the right one for a 500–750 word reflection on cultural healing practices.
| Model | Structure | Best For | Word Count Fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle (1988) | Description → Feelings → Evaluation → Analysis → Conclusion → Action Plan | Complex encounters; assessments that want to see emotional awareness alongside critical analysis | Works well at 600–750 words if you keep description and feelings brief and spend most words on analysis |
| Driscoll’s What? So What? Now What? (2007) | What happened? → So what does it mean? → Now what will I do? | Shorter assignments; simpler, more direct reflective style; less emphasis on emotional processing | Natural fit for 500–600 words — clean three-part structure maps well onto a short journal |
| Johns’ Model of Structured Reflection (1994) | Description → Reflection → Influencing factors → Alternative strategies → Learning | Ethically complex encounters; situations involving power, conflict, or moral discomfort | Manageable at 650–750 words; slightly more demanding to execute concisely |
The Practical Choice
If your assignment brief doesn’t specify a model and you’re writing 500–750 words, Driscoll’s What/So What/Now What is the most forgiving structure for a tight word count. It keeps you moving forward rather than getting stuck in the six stages of Gibbs. Gibbs works better when you have more space to develop the emotional and analytical sections properly. Whichever model you choose, name it in your opening paragraph — “Using Driscoll’s (2007) framework as a structure for this reflection…” — and then follow it. Markers check whether you actually use the model or just mention it once and abandon it.
Key Theoretical Frameworks You Need to Know
You need at least one cultural competence or cultural safety framework to anchor your analysis. Not to define at length — at 500–750 words you don’t have space for that — but to use as a lens. Here are the frameworks most frequently required in this type of assignment.
The Process of Cultural Competence in the Delivery of Healthcare Services
Describes cultural competence as an ongoing process — not a destination — involving five constructs: cultural awareness, cultural knowledge, cultural skill, cultural encounters, and cultural desire. Widely cited in nursing education. Useful for reflecting on where you currently sit in the process and what gaps the encounter revealed. The concept of “cultural desire” — the genuine motivation to engage rather than mere compliance — is particularly productive for honest self-reflection.
The Explanatory Model of Illness
A framework for understanding how patients and providers construct different explanations for illness — its cause, mechanism, course, and appropriate treatment. When a patient holds a cultural healing belief that diverges from biomedical explanation, Kleinman’s model gives you a structured way to think about that divergence and the nurse’s role in bridging it without dismissing either framework. Directly relevant to patient perspectives on cultural healing.
Transcultural Nursing Theory
The foundational nursing theory for cultural care — the Sunrise Model maps the factors that shape cultural health beliefs and practices. Leininger argued that culturally congruent care requires the nurse to discover, interpret, and use patients’ cultural knowledge in care planning. Useful in reflections where you are examining how well (or poorly) cultural healing beliefs were incorporated into the care the patient received.
Cultural Safety Framework
Goes beyond cultural competence to examine power, history, and structural inequality in healthcare encounters. Cultural safety asks not just whether a nurse is “culturally aware” but whether the patient feels safe — whether their cultural identity is respected or diminished in the healthcare interaction. Especially relevant when the cultural healing practice you are reflecting on involves a marginalised or historically oppressed community. Increasingly required at graduate level.
The LEARN Model
A practical clinical communication framework: Listen, Explain, Acknowledge, Recommend, Negotiate. Not a grand theoretical model, but extremely useful in reflections focused on a specific patient interaction. If your reflection centres on a conversation about a patient’s use of a traditional healing practice alongside biomedical treatment, LEARN gives you a clear, citable framework for evaluating how well the interaction was handled — and what could have been done differently.
Cultural competence is not a fixed endpoint. It is a journey that begins with awareness of one’s own cultural assumptions and ends — if it ends at all — only when practice genuinely centres the patient’s explanatory world alongside the clinician’s.
— Adapted from Campinha-Bacote (2002), The Process of Cultural Competency in the Delivery of Healthcare ServicesDon’t Treat Culture as a Monolith
One of the most persistent errors in cultural healing reflections is writing about “African healing practices” or “Asian traditional medicine” as if millions of people share identical beliefs. They don’t. Culture is not a demographic category — it is a dynamic, contested, individually experienced set of meanings. Your reflection should be specific: a particular practice, a particular patient, a particular belief system. Generalising from one patient’s cultural healing choices to an entire ethnic group is inaccurate and risks reinforcing the very stereotyping that cultural competence frameworks are designed to counteract. Markers in this area will notice — and penalise — overgeneralisation.
Section-by-Section Structure for a 2–3 Page Reflection
At 500–750 words you have almost no room to waste. The structure below is mapped to Gibbs’ model — the most commonly required — but the same principle applies regardless of which model you use: description is brief, analysis is long, and the action plan is specific.
Opening — Name the Experience and the Framework (50–80 words)
State what happened, when, and in what context — one or two sentences. Name the reflective model you are using. Name the cultural healing practice or belief you encountered. Don’t start with “Culture is very important in nursing today” — it’s wasted words. Start with the specific moment: “During a community placement, I encountered a patient who had been using herbal medicine recommended by a traditional healer alongside her prescribed antihypertensives.” That’s your opening. Everything from there is analysis.
What Happened (50–80 words maximum)
Brief description only. Who was involved, what was said or done, what was the cultural healing practice in question. This section often gets too long. The temptation is to explain the cultural practice in detail — don’t. One paragraph. The marker doesn’t need a literature review on herbal medicine or cupping therapy. They need enough context to understand the reflection that follows.
Your Initial Reaction and What It Revealed (80–100 words)
What did you feel or think in that moment? Were you uncertain how to respond? Did you make assumptions? Did the patient’s framing of their illness conflict with the biomedical understanding in ways that left you uncomfortable? This is where honest self-awareness earns marks. Don’t perform confidence you didn’t have. A reflection that says “I felt uncertain and initially defaulted to dismissing the patient’s belief as medically irrelevant” is more credible — and more analytically productive — than one that says “I immediately recognised the cultural significance and responded with full sensitivity.”
Analysis — Apply the Framework (200–250 words)
This is the heart of your reflection and where most of your word count goes. Apply your chosen theoretical framework to what happened. What does Campinha-Bacote’s model reveal about where you are in the cultural competence process? What does Kleinman’s Explanatory Model tell you about the gap between how you and the patient were understanding the illness? What would cultural safety mean in this context — was the patient’s cultural identity respected or marginalised in how care was delivered? Cite your framework precisely and use it to generate insight, not just as a name to drop. At minimum, one peer-reviewed source beyond the framework itself should appear here — a study or guideline that supports the point you are making about culturally competent practice.
Patient Perspective — Centre the Patient’s Experience (60–80 words)
Explicitly address what the cultural healing practice meant to the patient — not just what it was. Cultural practices are not just health choices; they are often tied to identity, community, family, and spiritual wellbeing. A patient who uses traditional remedies may be doing so for reasons that are psychologically, socially, and culturally meaningful in ways the biomedical model doesn’t capture. Your reflection should demonstrate that you understand this — and what it means for how nurses engage with patients about their healing beliefs.
Action Plan — Specific and Measurable (60–80 words)
Do not end with “I will be more culturally aware in future.” That’s a vague aspiration, not a plan. Instead: “I will familiarise myself with the most common traditional healing practices used in the patient population I work with, and in clinical encounters I will use Kleinman’s eight explanatory model questions to actively explore the patient’s illness narrative before developing a care plan.” That’s specific. It’s checkable. It shows you’ve actually thought about what changes.
Example Prompts and Annotated Passages
The passages below illustrate how the same encounter reads differently when written descriptively versus analytically. Read them alongside each other.
Starter Prompts If You’re Stuck on Where to Begin
What happened: During a home visit, my patient — a 68-year-old woman of South Asian background — mentioned she had been taking an Ayurvedic preparation her family sent from abroad alongside her prescribed antihypertensives. She had not told her GP.
Feelings / initial reaction: My immediate instinct was concern about drug interactions, which is clinically valid. But I also noticed I framed the conversation as “you shouldn’t be taking this without telling your doctor” rather than first asking what the preparation was, why she was using it, and what it meant to her.
Analysis hook: Using Campinha-Bacote’s (2002) framework, this moment sits at the intersection of cultural knowledge and cultural skill — I knew in principle that traditional remedies are common in this patient population, but I lacked the clinical skill to navigate the encounter in a way that honoured both the safety concern and her explanatory model of her own health.
What: During a paediatric admission, a patient’s parents declined a procedure and instead indicated their intention to pursue a traditional healing ceremony as their first intervention. The team’s response was thinly veiled frustration.
So what: This exposed a significant gap between the biomedical model’s individual patient-centred focus and the family-centred, community-embedded nature of healing in many cultural traditions. Ramsden’s (2002) cultural safety framework would ask whether this family felt culturally safe in this environment — and whether the team’s response made them more or less likely to engage with the medical recommendation.
Now what: The action is not to uncritically accept every treatment decision that conflicts with evidence-based care — it is to develop the communication skill to explore the family’s explanatory model first, acknowledge its legitimacy, and then collaboratively discuss the medical perspective. The LEARN model (Berlin & Fowkes, 1983) provides a concrete structure for exactly this kind of negotiation.
Opening move: If your reflection is based on a case study or reading rather than a clinical encounter, say so clearly in your opening line. “Although I have not yet encountered this situation in clinical practice, reading [X] prompted a significant shift in how I understand the relationship between cultural healing and patient perspectives, which I examine here using Johns’ (1994) framework.”
What to reflect on: Your assumptions before the case/reading, what they were, where they came from (training, media, family background). What the case/reading revealed that challenged those assumptions. What you would now do differently in practice. The absence of a direct clinical encounter does not prevent a high-quality reflection — it just means your “description” section describes an intellectual encounter rather than a clinical one.
Finding and Using Evidence in a Short Reflection
At 500–750 words, you will use two to four sources at most. That is not a weakness — it is appropriate for the assignment type. The question is which sources count.
Sources That Belong Here
- The primary theoretical framework (Campinha-Bacote, Leininger, Kleinman, Ramsden)
- One peer-reviewed nursing or health journal article on culturally competent practice
- A clinical guideline or policy relevant to cultural safety in your country’s healthcare system
- The reflective model itself (Gibbs, Driscoll, Johns) — cited as a source
Sources to Avoid
- Wikipedia, non-peer-reviewed websites, or cultural information sites
- Outdated epidemiological statistics without a current peer-reviewed source
- Textbook-only evidence with no engagement with primary research
- Sources that describe a cultural practice without connecting to nursing or clinical care
One Verified External Source Worth Knowing
The World Health Organization’s Traditional Medicine Strategy 2014–2023 (WHO, 2013) is a high-quality, freely available policy document that provides a global framework for understanding how traditional, complementary, and integrative medicine intersects with healthcare systems. It is directly relevant to reflections on patient use of traditional healing practices, gives you credible global epidemiological context (the WHO estimates that 80% of the world’s population uses traditional medicine as primary or supplementary care), and is the kind of institutional source that adds credibility to a short reflection. Find it at: who.int/publications/i/item/9789241506090.
Managing 500–750 Words Without Running Out of Space
This is a shorter assignment than most nursing students are used to, and the discipline it requires is different from a 2,000-word essay. The failure mode here is not running short — it’s spending too many words on description and running out of space for analysis.
| Section | Gibbs Model | Driscoll Model | Common Mistake |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opening / Framework Named | 50–80 words | 40–60 words | Too long — padded with general statements about cultural diversity |
| Description of Experience | 60–80 words | 60–80 words | Too long — explaining the cultural practice in detail instead of focusing on the encounter |
| Feelings / Initial Reaction | 50–70 words | Merged with So What | Too vague — “I felt unsure” without specifics about what made you unsure |
| Analysis (framework applied) | 200–230 words | 180–220 words | Too short — framework mentioned but not used analytically |
| Patient Perspective | 60–80 words | 60–80 words | Absent — the single most common marker complaint in this assignment type |
| Action Plan / Now What | 60–80 words | 60–80 words | Too vague — “be more culturally aware” without specific, checkable commitments |
The Errors That Cost Marks — and the Exact Fix
| ❌ Error | Why It Loses Marks | ✓ The Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Writing a report on the cultural practice, not a reflection on your experience | Misunderstands the assignment type entirely. Factual information about healing practices is not reflective writing | Keep cultural practice description to 2–3 sentences maximum. The rest is your analysis of your own response and professional development |
| Absent patient perspective | Fails a core criterion. The assignment title includes “patient perspectives” — it is not optional | Explicitly address what the practice meant to the patient — not just what it was. What did respecting or dismissing it mean for the therapeutic relationship? |
| Naming the framework but not using it | Campinha-Bacote’s name in the first paragraph followed by no further engagement signals surface-level engagement | Apply the framework’s specific constructs or questions to the specific encounter. Name which construct is relevant and explain what it reveals |
| Over-generalising across cultures | Inaccurate and at risk of reinforcing stereotypes — the opposite of what cultural competence frameworks argue for | Be specific to the individual patient’s beliefs and choices. Note that individual variation within cultural groups is enormous |
| Vague action plan | “Be more culturally aware” is not an action — it’s an aspiration with no mechanism | Name a specific behaviour change: a communication tool you will use, a resource you will read, a practice you will adopt in clinical encounters |
| Performing sensitivity rather than reflecting genuinely | Markers in this area are experienced clinicians. Polished cultural sensitivity language without genuine self-examination reads as hollow | Include a moment of honest discomfort, uncertainty, or assumption you now recognise as problematic. That authenticity is what earns high marks in reflective writing |
| Treating cultural competence as complete rather than ongoing | Misrepresents the frameworks — Campinha-Bacote explicitly describes cultural competence as a continuous process, not a final state | Reflect on where you are in the process and what the next step is — not on how culturally competent you now are |
Pre-Submission Checklist
Before You Submit — Check Every Item
- The reflection is grounded in a specific experience or encounter — not a general overview
- A named reflective model is stated in the opening and followed throughout
- At least one cultural competence or cultural safety framework is applied analytically, not just named
- The patient’s perspective is explicitly addressed — what the practice meant to them
- The analysis section is the longest section — description is brief
- At least one peer-reviewed source is cited in the analysis section
- The action plan names a specific, concrete behaviour change
- Person-first language used throughout — no reductive cultural stereotyping
- Word count is within 10% of the target range (500–750 words body text)
- Formatting matches the brief — double spaced, correct citation style
FAQs: Reflective Journal on Cultural Healing Practices
The One Thing That Makes This Reflection Work
Short assignments are harder than long ones. You don’t have space to hide in summary, and you can’t compensate for a thin argument with more sources. What makes a 500–750 word reflection on cultural healing practices land well is a single, specific moment of genuine self-examination — a point in your writing where you say, without pretence, “this is the assumption I brought, this is what it cost the patient, and this is specifically how I am going to be different.” That’s the whole assignment. Everything else — the model, the framework, the references — is the scaffolding that makes that moment credible.
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