Abstract

Background: Person-centredness is now an accepted term in policy and strategy documents worldwide, but Lavery (2016) highlights the need to bridge the gap between the aim of achieving person-centredness and the ability to deliver it. In this respect, practice development is a recognised methodology for enabling a person-centred culture (McCormack et al., 2013). This initiative follows on from a doctoral research study in the hospital that focused on the facilitation of person-centred cultures. Informed by the research, the nursing governance team decided to develop novice and proficient facilitators of person-centred practice for each nursing area in the hospital. These included clinical nurse specialists and clinical nurse managers.

Aim: This article aims to share the collective reflections of the participants in the workbased facilitators programme, one year on. It represents the shared reflections of 12 facilitators involved in the programme.

Conclusions and implications for practice: Effective workplace cultures cannot be changed by any individual alone and must involve the collaboration, inclusion and participation (CIP principles) of all stakeholders (McCance and McCormack, 2017, p 50). The hospital set out to the create conditions for clinical leaders to look inward at their own culture and to enable them to develop as critical allies and critical friends (Hardiman, 2017) of their own colleagues. The novice facilitators were supported through facilitated workshops and a weekly community of practice meeting, known as a huddle. The engagement process in this programme was initially slow but this had been anticipated and planned for. Our reflections concur with the practice development literature that cultural transformation will only happen in an organisation where there is ongoing leadership support (Cardiff, 2014). We intentionally use the person-centred practice framework (McCormack and McCance, 2017) to guide each element of our nursing practice. We have learned that by doing so we pay extra attention to our culture, thus enabling us to reflect on what we do, how we do it and how we feel about it. This, in turn, has focused our attention on becoming leaders and facilitators of others and resulted in human flourishing.

This article by Alice Timlin, Amanda Hastings and Michele Hardiman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 License.