Background: A community of practice was formed to address the research output of academic staff. The community consisted of five critical care nurses and one midwife, collaboratively agreed to embark on a practice development journey involving 11 intensive care units, to address the issues faced by these nurses and move current workplace culture to person-centred care.

Aims and objectives: The aim of this article is to reflect critically on the learning regarding facilitation experienced by the six members of a community of practice who participated as external facilitators during the first practice development school ever to be held in South Africa. The school was attended by 35 internal facilitators from 11 intensive care units in the public and private sectors.

Conclusions and implications for practice: The practice development journey has had a profound impact on the external facilitators in their personal and professional capacities. We realised that external facilitation is about assisting internal facilitators to find their own solution to challenges, not about fixing the problems ourselves.

This article by Celia J. Filmalter, Ilze van Eeden, Joanita de Kock, Brendan McCormack, Isabel Coetzee, Seugnette Rossouw and Tanya Heyns is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 License.