Creative Facilitation Testimonial – St Anthony’s Health Centre 

How have you used creative facilitation at St Anthony’s Health Centre?

Back in 2019, Mary helped us facilitate group consultations for patients at our practice with persistent pain. The sessions followed the model of Shared Medical Appointments, which seek to improve self-management and make better use of clinicians’ time by providing a space for health professionals to see groups of patients with similar conditions for clinical care, education and peer support. In our sessions, patients with fibromyalgia, chronic musculoskeletal pain, inflammatory arthritis and related conditions received individual attention from a GP and collective education about their condition, their medication and coping strategies.  

 From April to October, we ran monthly group consultations with 15 patients between the ages of 25 and 80. The sessions were designed to be patient led, so did not have a structured ‘curriculum’ of content. However, a key aim was to explore alternative self-management techniques like tai chi and mindfulness to reduce reliance on medication.  

Creative facilitation was essential to both the planning and delivery of these sessions. Mary brought creative and innovative techniques like check-ins and the structure of focused conversation, which helped us make the most of the group’s time together, and her in the room skills meant that she deftly handled group dynamics, especially when challenges arose.

What were the benefits of using creative facilitation?

Feedback on the group consultations was really positive. Our patients said they learned a lot about persistent pain (particularly from each other), including strategies to cope with it, and that the peer support element helped with normalisation, leaving them feeling less isolated and alone in their experiences. The use of creative facilitation techniques made the sessions enjoyable and fun. For staff, the group sessions were also a positive experience, providing a new and refreshing way to work. They provided more time for health professionals to hear patient stories and to give explanations of complex concepts than they would have in a ten-minute appointment. The use of underpinning facilitation processes also deepened rapport by providing an opportunity to engage with patients in a relaxed, and informal environment.  

 Personally, I have learnt lots from working alongside Mary.  This includes ‘borrowing’ particular techniques and strategies from creative facilitation, but more importantly (and harder to define) there is an approach, a way of being, that I try to emulate when working with groups. It’s an approach that balances being confident enough to hold the space and make participants feel safe and included, while at the same time being unobtrusive enough to encourage genuine open contribution.

What were the challenges?

The group consultations were a new format for both the clinicians and for Mary, as well as for the patients themselves. There were challenges as we grappled with this new way of consulting. For example, due to the heterogeneous nature of the group, it was sometimes difficult to draw out themes that resonated with all patients, and to balance this with an individual’s desire to focus on the specifics of their own medical condition.  

Group attendance was another issue. As we expected a high drop-out rate, we deliberately over-invited patients to the sessions, and when large numbers did in fact attend this caused issues with timekeeping. We dealt with these challenges through a facilitated debrief after each session, which enabled us to learn from our experiences together and to make changes in future sessions. When we ran another programme of group consultations later in the year, for example, we adapted the recruitment strategy so that it was more self-selecting and specific to a particular diagnosis (i.e. fibromyalgia).  

Have you used creative facilitation in any other contexts?

Yes. More recently, in 2024–25, Mary and I co-developed and co-delivered a Student Selective Component (SCC) on medical humanities for undergraduate medical students at Newcastle University. An SCC is a short course, usually 4 or 5 weeks, that allows medical students to explore specific interests and develop skills beyond the core medical curriculum. Our SSC drew on creative facilitation methods and source materials from anthropology, philosophy, literature and film studies. In the feedback, students said it provided a unique opportunity to step away from clinical placements and reflect on important aspects of medicine (e.g. patient experience, health inequalities) that they might not ordinarily have time to explore. Two students said it would be ‘transformational’ in terms of the kinds of doctors they would become. 

What role, if any, do you see for creative facilitation in your future work?

We are planning new group interventions with patients at the practice, so I hope our facilitation of these will be informed by creative facilitation.