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Being attached to a piece of medical technology may cause patients physical and emotional distress. Critical care nurses need to empathize and respond to the patient's experience on being attached to all forms of medical equipment. The use of sedation must be carefully considered in response to agitation. Critical care is also palliative care. Compassion is a virtue.

Reflective practice, as an ideal model, is generally espoused as a developmental process to empower practitioners to achieve and sustain effective practice. Yet when reflective practice is accommodated into the real world of everyday practice can this ideal itself be realised? Or will reflective practice be accommodated within existing norms whereby it becomes another technology of surveillance? The paper draws on dialogue taken from a guided reflection session to consider whether reflection can be empowering and to consider those factors which limit this potential.

Who is a reflective practitioner? It is assumed that a reflective practitioner is someone who views and responds to practice through an appropriate reflective lens. The present paper is a reflective account that gives meaning to being a reflective practitioner within everyday practice whereby the reflective lens is structured through the Burford Nursing Development Unit (NDU) Model: Caring in Practice.

This paper develops a single shared experience within a guided reflection to highlight the process of guiding learning through reflection. The shared experience is a mundane everyday experience concerned with the ward sister on an acute elderly ward responding to a relative's request. From the reflective practice perspective, the analysis of a single experience becomes a significant source of knowledge to inform others' practice. Reflective practitioners always interpret extant knowledge for its relevance to their practice. This process is helped by reflective accounts because they are subjective and contextualized accounts and therefore aid interpretation.