What is Really Learning

Really Learning aims to improve health care by enabling care professionals to flourish and make the kind of contribution they envisaged when they first chose health care as a career.

This often involves reconnecting health care professionals (HCPs) with a passionate form of professionalism that many have lost, so we describe this here. The ways in which we work with professionals (individuals, teams, services and organisations) are described further under Putting People in touch with Powerful Ideas.

Passionate professionalism

Really Learning suggests that a health care profession has the following characteristics:

1. it is concerned with health and health care where these are perceived as follows:

health – ‘Any genuine theory of health will be concerned to identify one or more human potentials which might develop, but which are presently or likely to be blocked. Health work, however it is defined, will seek first to discover and then prevent or remove obstacles to the achievement of human potential.’
David Seedhouse - Liberating Medicine.

In this view, health work does not solely address illness (although that is important) but is aimed at increasing the autonomy, the degrees of freedom, of the patient.

health care – ‘Acts of work and/or courage undertaken with the intention of enabling the potential of patients’. Valerie Iles - Really Managing Health Care.

2. It acquires, uses and further develops a specialised knowledge base and set of skills and members use these to diagnose the needs of patients and then either to follow a guideline, or to work ‘off piste’ – using their professional judgement and their relationship with the patient to determine which. In this way professionals are concerned to bring both meaning and consistency to their encounter with patients.

3. A profession earns its right to be self governing by the self responsibility it demonstrates. It exercises self responsibility through self reflection, constantly challenging itself to use its knowledge, skills and influence to maximise its own contribution to health care and to influence the nature of the health care system – to the benefit of patients and the wider community.

This is so far from where many health care professions currently are that to be successful we may need to develop a new model of professionalism, and to work with others to engender a new spirit, a re-energising, re-ethicising and re-professionalising of the health care professions.

Putting people in touch with powerful ideas

We work with health care professionals and their organisations to enable them to take responsibility for developing local solutions, for exploiting local opportunities and for working constructively with others in order to do so.

To this end we:

• enable HCPs to become more effective at influencing others, at dealing with people they find difficult, and at making the most of their service resources.
• offer HCPs the tools they need if they are to analyse service delivery problems as effectively as they can diagnose clinical conditions
• enable HCPs to explore their decision making processes and to evaluate the evidence needed to inform service delivery decisions

In other words, Really Learning aims to offer Health Care Professionals opportunities to learn how to drive forward an NHS which is responsive to needs and which uses the best of modern methods - but really learn   Real Learning involves:

• making the complicated easy and the simple hard
• learning from theory and from experience           
• learning about how to keep on learning.

Really Learning is a network of independent academic developers who:

• use theory to inform practice, and use practice to develop theory
• use evidence - our approaches are based on evidence about teaching and learning, and the concepts we use are rooted in sound theory and supported by appropriate evidence
• encourage the generation of evidence, and promote discussion about the nature of evidence that is meaningful for different kinds of decision.