The facilitator role and the Schwartz Centre Round.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Florence Nightingale Foundation for the opportunity to undertake this piece of work and for all those who interviewed me and not only recognised my commitment and potential but challenged me to consider more deeply how I could explore practice and share my learning.

I would like to offer my heartfelt gratitude to the James Tudor Foundation for supporting my travel scholarship – without such generosity I would never have had the opportunity to learn from colleagues in the US.

Also I would like to acknowledge the support that I have had from my colleagues in the organisation in which I work and our partner Universities– to my colleagues who had the confidence in me to provide references that supported my application for the travel scholarship; our Chief Executive who first introduced me to Schwartz Rounds; to my fellow Facilitators and Clinical Leads who are inspirational and our team working allows our work to continue and to all my colleagues and friends who have supported me in and out of my daily work.

Abstract

My travels enabled me to consider in more depth the facilitator role within the Schwartz Centre Rounds – I had the time to observe in detail, time to think, time to consider and time to reflect up on my own practice as a facilitator whilst learning from other facilitators both in the US and closer to home in Wales.

A Schwartz Centre Round is typically a monthly forum at which health care practitioners from all staff groups consider the caring and human dimensions of their work. The approach whilst originally modelled on the idea of a medical grand round includes a presentation of a case or scenario and then encourages an opportunity for discussion with an audience of colleagues.

During my observations of Schwartz Centre Rounds I focused up on what it was that the facilitator did and what difference did the facilitator role have on the panel, on the audience and on the outcomes of the discussions.

My report puts in to context the purpose of the Rounds, facilitation skills in a general sense and the role of facilitation specifically in the Rounds.  I consider the things I learnt in the US where Rounds have been running for twenty years and how this learning can influence the Rounds in my own place of work were we have been running them for two years and those other organisations in Wales where the Rounds are at an embryonic or infancy stage.