What is Relational Practice?

We thought it would be helpful to make a video to explain what we mean by "Relational Practice" - both what it looks like and what we do to help bring it about.

Relational practice means helping people feel safe, connected and understood, allowing them to do their best, most creative thinking and provide the highest quality care.

Everything that happens in a healthcare setting happens in a relationship: care planning, decision making, discharge preparation, nappy changing, dressing changing, shift changing, all of this occurs in the relationships between people. We start from the view that we are, all of us, human: patients, families, staff, colleagues, teams, leaders, all just human, nested in a complex web of relationships. This is not a controversial view, but when we embrace what it really means, our relationships can be transformed.

Relational practice is about shaping those relationships for everyone through compassion, trust and dialogue, where difference can be safely discussed and thought about. It is about helping people connect with other people around us as human beings each with our own needs .

We know that, when relationships in healthcare grow from this place of connection and mutual understanding, clinical outcomes, safety and quality all improve. Patient and family experience improves, as does staff satisfaction and morale.

This is neither easy nor straightforward. Although we all have the capacity to connect with others through compassion, trust and dialogue, these key relational skills can easily be derailed by stress and threat, by scarcity and competition, and by difference and disadvantage.

So relational practice is also about how we scaffold our relationships in the face of these challenges. This couldn’t be more important, as the system continues to respond to highly critical public enquiries into perinatal care.

What do we need? How can we create the conditions that will cultivate and maintain collaborative, compassionate, connected relationships in the face of the many trials that can undermine them?

What do we do?

Here at The Relational Practice, our work is all about sharing, in an accessible way, what we have learned from psychological theory and research about why these kinds of relationships matter, what gets in the way and, crucially, how we can navigate these challenges in our pursuit of collaboration, compassion and connection.

Learning

So we offer training, in person and virtually, on a whole host of topics about relational practice. We also produce training in bitesize and free to access format to get the message out about the kinds of thing that might be helpful.

Trying out new skills

But relational practice is not just about understanding in the abstract what this needs to look like. Relational practice is a complex set of skills, some of which might be quite new and unfamiliar, all of which can be easily detailed when the going gets tough. So people need opportunities to practice those skills, in context, so that they can embody and embrace them, and find ways to use these skills for collaboration, compassion and connection in ways that fit for them and their situation.

The training that we offer is creative and interactive and provides lots of opportunities to try out new approaches to your work, in a safe environment.

Reflection to make sense of it all

We also view reflection as a key part of relational practice. It’s central to learning these new skills, and also provides much needed social connection, creative thinking space and nourishing restoration. Reflective space is a foundation of our work, as it allows us to apply our learning and, importantly, stay flexible and adapt ourselves and our teams to new relational challenges.

We facilitate these reflective spaces for you,  either as part of a specific training package or as a separate ongoing arrangement. We can do that in groups, which can be great as it offers structured peer support as well as that solution focused energy that happens when you get many brains and bodies thinking together. We can also do it for individuals in a supervisory relationship, which lets us dig into stuff in a bit more depth.

Consultation to teams

One of the other services that we provide is consultation to teams – that allows you to unpack and look inside a particular challenge facing you. Those focused spaces can help you to understand patterns within your team, and plan for what is needed to move forward and adapt.

Between us we have three decades of experience working in the NHS and have led psychological services in neonatal, perinatal mental health, and paediatric care. In recent years, we have been leading, along with a group of colleagues, the development of psychological support in neonatal care across England.

Our purpose with The Relational Practice is to facilitate change across maternity, neonatal, perinatal and paediatric care by promoting safeness, connection, dialogue, and mutual understanding.

Please do get in touch if you would like to find out more.