Connecting through communities: How a voluntary organization is influencing healthcare policy and practice

Abstract

In recent years, the UK charity Macmillan Cancer Relief has been developing innovative ways of stimulating learning—among health professionals, patients and carers—to improve the experience of people living with cancer. In essence what it is doing is to create and support a number of groups and communities that ‘float’ around its organizational structure and extend its reach far beyond its formal boundaries. Because these groups are not part of the formal structure, they cannot be ‘managed’ like normal organizational teams. Nonetheless, the conversations and stories shared in them generate new ways of thinking and practising, and may also result in tangible ‘products’, such as documents, standards or major programmes. This way of working through groups of people, which is informed by relational theories of learning and change and insights from complexity theory, contrasts with attempts by many organizations to base their knowledge management on technology alone. It enables Macmillan to stay connected with the experience of hundreds of doctors, nurses and others directly affected by cancer. Relationships established in this way often live on long after the formal relationship with the organization finishes. And these relationships, combined with the more tangible outputs of the groups, help Macmillan influence thinking and practice in the National Health Service. This kind of work cannot be measured satisfactorily by traditional methods, and the second part of this article, to appear in a future issue, will explore some innovative methods being developed by Macmillan to evaluate and learn from its experience with communities.

Keywords:

• Communities of practice
• organizational learning
• complexity
• knowledge management
• conversation
• stories

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Lank

Specialist in Collaborative Working