Action learning and healthcare

Abstract

Action learning has long had a symbiotic relationship with healthcare. Revans, in his early study of staff communications at Manchester Royal Infirmary (1964), built on the work of Menzies-Lyth (1959) and described a hospital as an ‘institution cradled in anxiety’. He went on in the late 1960s and early 1970s to work with 10 London teaching hospitals in the Hospital Internal Communications (HIC) project (Revans 1982a) which may have been the first Organisation Development intervention in the UK’s National Health Service (Edmonstone 2022). The HIC project was the subject of extensive external and internal evaluation (Wieland and Leigh 1971; Wieland 1981; Revans 1972) and led, in turn, to another major project concerned with the multi-agency coordination of services for people with learning disabilities from 1969 to 1972 (Brook 2020; Revans 1982b; Revans and Baquer 1972). However, it was not until the current century that the use of action learning in healthcare became more widespread. A cursory study of published journal articles on this subject from 1972 (the year that action learning was ‘clarified in both content and form’ (Boshyk 2019) to 1999 (a period of 26 years) identifies some 32 articles, while the period 2000–2021 (some 21 years) provides 173, many of which have featured in this journal. The applications of action learning are especially pronounced in relation to leadership development in different contexts (Scowcroft 2005; McCray, Warwick, and Palmer 2018) and include: