Action Learning in Health, Social and Community Care: Principles, Practices and Resources

This comprehensive guide covers all aspects of action learning, one of the most widely used development methods in health, social and community care. The book addresses the theory and practice of action learning in these fields, and considers action learning as an adult educational ethos as well as a helpful tool. Based upon emerging experience, it identifies good practice in action learning and offers a wide range of resources to enable individuals and organisations extract maximum benefit from this approach.

Offering practical tips grounded in sound educational principles, this book is invaluable reading for all senior managers and professionals considering using action learning for leadership, management and organisation development purposes, including organisation development practitioners and action learning facilitators, and for medical and healthcare educators and their counterparts in social and community care looking for a general introduction to this growing field.

John Edmonstone is a leadership, management and organisation development consultant with extensive experience within the public services both within the UK and internationally. He has some 30 years’ experience of successful consultancy work in the human resource management and organisation development fields in the United Kingdom National Health Service, and within local government, higher and further education in such areas as leadership and management development, coaching and mentoring, evaluation research, partnership working and team development.

He has worked regularly with action learning since meeting with Professor Reg Revans in the 1970s, largely with health care managers and clinical professionals, but also in multiagency contexts, principally within the UK, but also in Ireland and Indonesia.

He runs a successful consultancy business based in Ripon, North Yorkshire and is Senior Research Fellow at the School of Social Science and Public Policy, Keele University; Research Fellow at the Institute for Global Health and Development, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh and Associate at Skills for Health. He is on the editorial boards of the journals Action Learning: Research and Practice, Leadership in Health Services and the International Journal of Healthcare.

He is the author of the books Action Learning in Health Care: A Practical Handbook (2011) and The Action Learner’s Toolkit (2003) and is author of many journal articles on action learning.