University of Ulster, Northern Ireland
Foreword
Navigating contemporary health and social care
As I reflect on this unprecedented time in history that we are experiencing with the global COVID‐19 pandemic, I observe that the strength and creativity required of healthcare teams everywhere have been challenged and are to be celebrated. This edition of International Practice Development in Health and Social Care has transpired during this season. The chapters unfold as authentic ‘word portraits’ from the contributors’ practice to form a collage of the ways that healthcare responds in myriad contexts.
Within its pages, application of practice development across the life span and care continuum advocates for the voice of vulnerable members of our communities. Theory and courage merge to provide frameworks and approaches that align with individual practitioners’ values, and identity and indigenous knowledge are honoured as foundations of person centredness for individuals, teams and organisations.
Growing a workforce that thrives as it meets the needs of the people it serves requires vision, leadership and a relational participatory culture that is agile and can respond to increasing demands and complexity at all levels. Skilled facilitation enables growth to be cultivated and fractured aspects of team culture to be resolved, providing an environment of wellbeing and self‐care.
This edition is a compelling narrative of experience and theory within a global context, woven together to provide a pathway towards a values‐based journey of flourishing for healthcare recipients, practitioners, teams and organisations.
Cheryl Atherfold
Deputy Chief Nurse, Waikato District Health Board,
Percival Flats, Hamilton, New Zealand
Foreword
Compassionate leadership, teamworking and reflection in practice development
The pandemic has triggered global tragedy, pain, fear, anxiety and darkness. Yet, at the darkest times there is an opportunity for the light of learning to stream in. I believe that the three key areas of learning from this crisis are compassionate leadership, teamworking and reflection.
Compassion is the core value of our healthcare system and it is the most potent healthcare intervention. The challenge is for us to create cultures in our organisations where staff are both encouraged and enabled to deliver high‐quality, compassionate care. Leaders must embody compassion in the way they lead by attending to those they lead (‘listening with fascination’); seeking a shared understanding via dialogue of the challenges those they lead face; being emotionally intelligent and empathising; and finally helping those they lead to deliver high‐quality, compassionate, patient‐centred care. This theme is powerfully developed in the leadership chapters in this volume.
Effective teamwork is fundamental to healthcare, practice development and the flourishing of staff. It is teams that innovate through collaboration, cooperation and co‐design. Our teamworking skills are probably more important than our technical skills for practice development. Team members must have the courage to eliminate the blockages caused by hierarchy and professional boundaries. Team members must genuinely value diversity, be it professional, opinion or demographic, so that we use the knowledge, skills, abilities and experience of all for practice development. Effective teamworking is core to practice development, to high‐quality care, to innovation and to the mental health of staff. This volume effectively reinforces those messages through both evidence and experience.
The third theme that is exemplified in every one of the contributions in this volume is the importance of our taking time to be still, to reflect and to learn. Leaders, teams and organisations are more productive, effective and innovative when they take time out to pause and reflect. Such times of stillness are associated with wellbeing, but also with productivity and innovation. Busy health and care teams which take time out on a regular basis, to stop, to debrief, to review, are on average between 35 and 40 per cent more productive than teams that simply keep reacting to chronic excessive workload.
These three themes are fundamental to practice development, as they were to helping us during the dark times of this pandemic. Above all, for genuine practice development, we must build belonging and trust, and develop cultures of compassion. We must come to see ourselves, the people we work with, those we care for and the people we lead as fundamentally more caring, cooperative and compassionate if we are to create a brighter future. This volume helps us to do precisely that.
Michael West is Senior Visiting Fellow at The King’s Fund and Professor of Organisational Psychology at Lancaster University.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank everyone who has contributed to chapters in this book and shared their time and expertise so freely. You have all been an inspiration. We would also like to recognise the unconditional support of family and friends in this endeavour as we constantly worked to achieve deadlines. We would especially like to thank Maree Parker, who so diligently worked with our manuscripts to ensure everything was in place and correctly presented.
1. Transforming Health and Social Care Using Practice Development
Kim Manley, Valerie Wilson, and Christine Øye
Setting the scene at this time of high challenge
As we write this chapter, we are in the middle of a global pandemic that is testing the resilience and values of people, communities, health and social care systems everywhere. Practice development (PD) offers practical strategies for how these challenges can be addressed founded on values‐based ways of working that are compassionate, person‐centred, safe and effective.
Despite the often unpredictable challenges faced when providing care, of which the current pandemic is an extreme example, practice guided by the values outlined above will be recognised in the workplace by the priority given to wellbeing, how teams manage challenges, and ways of working that involve everyone through collaboration, inclusion and participation to enable empowerment. The multiple perspectives and expertise resulting from this approach when applied to systematic learning and improvement that questions assumptions will enable positive and sustainable change to occur.
Regardless of setting, PD involves creating the conditions in which practitioners individually and collectively flourish. These conditions are associated with positive benefit for those who both provide and experience health and social care (West 2016; Braithwaite et al. 2017).
This introductory chapter aims to explain the relevance of PD and its potential to support health and social care at every level through focusing on what matters to people. Additionally, the chapter will outline developments since the first edition in 2008 and highlight how PD principles have driven the content of chapters and the ways in which the authors have worked together to bring you this latest edition.
Practice development: its relevance to contemporary health and social care and crisis
PD is about our individual and collective practice as health and social care practitioners in any setting. Our purpose based on what matters to people has at its heart relationships with individuals, people and communities based on a shared set of values and visions about how we work together and with those experiencing care.
However, most health and social care is provided in teams and increasingly across complex systems, where workplace culture and contexts are recognised as