Context: Our acute trust recently opened a unit for people with acute medical problems and dementia. As well as environmental changes, we realised that an explicit statement of the values, beliefs and attitudes of our new team was required.

Aims and objectives: We wanted our manifesto to be a collaborative document with real meaning for us as practitioners. We hoped adopting this method would empower the staff team to take an active part in shaping the kind of care we want to offer. We ran a workshop that used comics and practitioner research methods. We aimed to get ‘under the surface’ of practice and allow a liminal space for multi-disciplinary communication. In this article, we aim to explain the principles of our practice, describe what we did as part of our induction for staff on the unit, show the outcome (our ward manifesto) and discuss what learning might have taken place.

Conclusion: Staff engaged enthusiastically in the workshop. The comics produced, and analysis of them, allowed practitioners to look at practice in a new way. There was real communication between team members from different disciplines. The manifesto shows the complexity of our values in a simple, accessible way and is now displayed on the unit.

Implications for practice:

• Innovative learning methods can be useful when exploring the values of practice
• Creating a safe, liminal space allows creativity and honest communication within a team

This article by Muna Al-Jawad and Lucy Frost is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 License.