Michele Hardiman

Practice Development , Education and Research facilitator | Blackrock Health Galway Ireland / Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh

I am a nurse by background, and I currently work in Blackrock Health a private hospital group in Ireland. I have been a member of the ICOP since it started as a Student ICOP in 2011.

Following my experience of working on the ‘Ireland programme’ with Brendan and the late Professor Jan Dewing, I was curious how person-centred facilitation had made such a difference to culture and context of care in the service that I worked in.  I commenced my PhD to further examine the attributes and skills that a person-centred facilitator of culture, needed to display.

As part of my doctoral journey, I developed a Framework known as ‘Facilitation on the Run; Critical Allies and Critical Friends’(Hardiman,2017; Hardiman and Dewing, 2019) which is widely used internationally.

My experience and learning in and from practice using the PCPF (McCormack, McCance, 2021) as my guide, changed my understanding of leadership in healthcare and how I needed to transform my ways of working and being, to be a person-centred leader. Creating the conditions when all aspects of care delivery can be person-centred is my focus: for example I have led, in my hospital group, a programme to embed person-centred language and approaches within Nursing and Allied health documentation within our EHR.

Currently I am leading the expansion of our person-centred philosophy which is well established in one of our hospitals to two additional hospitals. The driver for this is the implementation of the Electronic Health Record and I have used this technical impetus to drive the need to develop person-centred facilitators in all 3 sites who in turn will work with their own teams to look at culture and care pathways. 

I remain passionate about person-centred practice and how the development of facilitators within hospitals and healthcare settings can significantly transform the outcomes for both staff and the persons receiving care.  

My experience in promoting and translating person-centredness and person-centred research into practice settings will I believe support the work of the ICOP with the lens of  healthcare industry.