Personal development plans (PDPs) help you identify and carry out development that you will need. The areas of development can be very diverse. You might want to develop in any of a number of areas, for example by:

All of these things would be related to your practice as a nurse. The beauty of planning is that you can choose the areas you want to develop. As you probably have guessed, PDP and reflection are closely linked. As you reflect, you start to see what you need for development. The PDP then helps you work out how you are going to develop.

Some other areas that might drive your development planning are government initiatives and policies, which are:

The professional press (books and journals) can also help you become aware of areas where you need to develop. For example, you might have read an article about catheter care in the Nursing Standard or Nursing Times, and it made you realise that you don’t have a good understanding of suprapubic catheterisations. You have recognised that this is a development need, as you care for patients with catheters.

In addition, there are national nursing forums, specialty nursing groups and organisations such as the Royal College of Nursing that will put out material designed to help you recognise gaps and advance your practice.

All of these things – reflection, policy, your employer, books and journals, and organisations – can give you ideas about how to develop your practice. They can also help you to develop that practice once you know what you want to do. But in order to get there, you need a plan.

The plan starts by you looking inward and taking an inventory of what you already know, what you can build on, what is weak and what you think you need.

Let’s use Oliver as an example:

As a new nurse, Oliver has identified nine areas in which he wants to develop himself and his practice. He decides to focus on just one area for now: wound care. Remember the nursing process (assess, plan, implement/intervention, evaluation) mentioned in Chapter 2? In the same way, Oliver has done his assessment and moves on to his plan.

The first step of the plan is actually a transition between your assessment and your plan. In the initial stage, you are looking more in-depth at each of your assessed needs. It has two real purposes: to help keep you motivated because you really understand why you need this level of development, and to help you think out what you need to do to achieve goals.

Your initial plan should be based on a basic formula:

What? Why? Where? When? How? and Who?

Looking at his development needs for ‘wound care’, Oliver makes the following plan:

For each of these, he develops another plan:

One thing Oliver notices is that there isn’t a lot of information available on wound care and wound-care products in the team’s office, so he starts to build a team resource folder as he finds information for himself.

After he has taken the wound-care course, Oliver realises that his team could use an audit of the patients’ wounds and the wound-care products being used. He asks his team leader for help and together they design an audit tool. He brings it to a team meeting and asks everyone to use it.

Once he has all the information for the audit, Oliver and his team leader look at the findings. He finds that although most nurses use products in the way suggested by Tissue Viability (as specified in the policies given out in the wound-care course), in a few cases the dressings used don’t seem to make sense. The team leader reviews these cases and decides that a team update on wound care would be useful. Oliver is asked to prepare a brief presentation on his audit and the team leader offers help so that Oliver can do a presentation on what the results mean for the team.