Since August 2016, AP has been working for the West Midlands Patient Safety Collaborative, which is part of the West Midlands Academic Health Science Network (WMAHSN).

In recent years dedicated staff in Birmingham Children’s Hospital have been using Appreciative Inquiry as the method for a programme called “Learning from Excellence”,

WMAHSN received such good reports of their work and such interest from its members that they decided to support its rollout across the region.
As a result, they ran a series of introductory talks called “Where did it all go right?” and then asked interested people to sign up for a two-day AI training course run by Appreciating People (5 courses were run).

Traditionally, safety in healthcare has focused on avoiding harm by learning from error, but this approach may miss opportunities to learn from excellent practice. Excellence in healthcare is highly prevalent, but there is no formal system to capture it. By Learning from Excellence [learningfromexcellence.com/], Adrian Plunkett says:

“We tend to regard excellence as something to gratefully accept, rather than something to study and understand. Our preoccupation with avoiding error and harm in healthcare has resulted in the rise of rules and rigidity, which in turn has cultivated a culture of fear and stifled innovation. It’s time to redress the balance. We believe that studying excellence in healthcare can create new opportunities for learning and improving resilience and staff morale.”

The participants Appreciating people worked with at WMAHSN really responded to using Ai to create positive education, and to work on their Quality Improvement. It helped them build resilience, as they were focusing on the things they were good at, and celebrated their successes.