Although the activity known as “facilitation” has been around for as long as people have worked together in groups, it is only in more recent times that its value as a life and business skill in its own right has been acknowledged.

Increasing recognition and understanding of the potential of people within organisations to contribute significantly to business success have led to a library of books being written and even graduate degrees being offered in the subject.

Many meetings are often facilitated rather than ‘chaired’ in the traditional sense, particularly where the outcome is open to and ultimately determined by the contributions of those attending.

Some of the most successful teams or groups share the facilitation role around their members, resulting in improved cooperation, ‘buy-in’ to the outcomes and personal development of the individual.

Meetings

Meetings are great opportunities to innovate, solve problems and make decisions with the collective intelligence of a group. On the other hand, meetings are also a frequent source of frustration and many people simply prefer to avoid meetings to protect their productive working hours. (I’m guessing you’ve been in a few of these recently haven’t you?).

This is where facilitation comes into the picture:

“the art of making meetings participative and effective”.

I am sure you have been involved in many types of group situations in healthcare, and particularly in complex health discussions or those where people have different views and interests, where good facilitation can make the difference between success and failure of the meeting.

With this in mind, a client approached RHS and asked us to develop a Facilitation Skills Workshop for their internal Clinical Managers.

This is a unique and forward-thinking approach, in that in the past RHS has been invited to actually be the facilitator of clinical and non-clinical customer-facing meetings.

The challenge set before RHS was how we could develop an education platform that would support the client’s own clinical managers to become confident and competent facilitators of the future.

The challenge was accepted and a workshop developed to achieve exactly this.

All the workshop preparation, delivery and follow up was supported by RHS. The workshop had a clear blend of theory and practical learning through group and individual exercises.

If you believe a good grasp of the theory of facilitation and the ability to facilitate successful meetings is something that you and your team could benefit from then please do get in touch.

Remembering too that at RHS we are able to support the facilitation of regional, national and international meetings, from internal board meetings through to complex clinical Advisory Boards.

We have developed some extremely valuable material in the form of a PDF – if you’d like this, please get in touch.