Our world is ever-changing and our work is getting increasingly complex. To take on the urgent challenges that we face, we need fresh ideas about how we work together, and inspiring leaders willing to encourage others to go on that journey.

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are groups of people who share a passion for improving practice in health and care. Practitioners from different backgrounds, with different perspectives, come together across organisations and across hierarchies to meet as equals to create new knowledge and develop potential solutions to those “wicked problems” that go beyond what each of us can address in isolation.

These groups of professionals are brought together by a convener/co-convener to voluntarily explore how to bring about change for the better. By focusing on patient care across health and social care organisations, the work of these self-selecting Communities will have a real impact on patient experience and outcomes.

Conveners of CoPs have a passion for improving patient care but are often new to the concept of CoPs and are unsure of how best to ‘hold’ that space and to make this way of working ‘land’ in the health and social care environment. In January 2019 the Health Foundation’s Q Network and the Health Innovation Network (HIN) launched the first Communities of Practice Leadership Development Programme as an experiential learning programme specifically to address these challenges and provide all the building blocks for successful Community of Practice leadership.

Now for the third time, this programme is open for applications from 13 October  2022 – 25 November 2022.

The programme is strongly based on practical experience and builds on successful Communities of Practice currently hosted by the HIN and Q members, recognising the convener role as a key leadership skill for the complex issues faced by the health and care professionals of today.

This unique leadership programme is designed specifically for health and care professionals looking to develop collective leadership capability, who already have, or are planning to establish a CoP, where they can apply the learning from this programme. Participants are usually in a position to provide leadership through their community to support improvements in care for patients or service users.

The programme is strongly based on practical experience and builds on successful CoPs currently hosted by the HIN and Q members. Participants can place the experience of their own CoPs at the centre of every module and contribute to workshop content based on their own needs.