Community of Practice

PEPAs Community of Practice (CoP) is a space where all PEPA and IPEPA placement participants and PEPA mentors come together to share their experience and learning in palliative care.

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Useful links

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GP Placements – Sunshine Coast Community

General Practitioners - Sunshine Coast
Watch this video from GPs in the Sunshine Coast Community who attended various PEPA placements this year in 2021.  Learn more about how their PEPA placement has supported their practice with the patients in their clinics.…

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Natalie Fry – Placement Outcome Project

Registered Nurse - Toowoomba Hospital
Natalie completed a 2 day PEPA placement at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital (RBWH) Palliative Care Liaison Service. The placement involved Natalie observing inpatient consults with palliative care patients that were referred from admitting teams.…

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Dr Sarah Freeman – Placement goals and Outcomes

GP - Claremont Village Medical Centre
Dr Sarah Freeman is a GP who works at the Claremont Village Medical Centre, Claremont, Tasmania. Sarah’s goals and reflection of learning were: Goal – Gain a better understanding of medications used for symptom control. Reflection…

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Michael Lindley-Jones Workplace Activity Outcome

Intensive Care Consultant - Robina Hospital
Michael coordinated a collaboration study with the  Tweed and Lismore Hospital Intensive Care Units (ICU)s.   The study involves all family members of dying patients who are willing to participate, as well as staff caring for those…

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Jenna Rizzoli – Placement Outcome Report

Pharmacist - Charters Towers Hospital
The following is a direct copy of Jenna’s outcome report she submitted to PEPA QLD from her placement. Objective: To implement a guideline to provide symptomatic relief for palliative care patients in a rural and remote…

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Alisdair McGrouther – Workplace Activity Outcome

General Practitioner - Fraser Coast Medical Centre
Alisdair attended placement and returned to his workplace with  resources and information to assist his colleagues to offer a higher provision of Palliative Care for all patients in their service.  The information that Alisdair provided was…

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Natalie Humphrey – Placement Outcome

Pharmacist - Townsville University Hospital
This excerpt is directly from Natalie’s placement report :- “Completing a PEPA placement at the Townsville University Hospital Palliative Care Centre was an invaluable start to my palliative studies at Monash. This placement and our initial…

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Kristen Payne – Activity Outcome Report

Radiation Therapist - Princess Alexandra Hospital
Kristen is part of the Rapid Access Palliative Radiotherapy Initiative at Princess Alexandra Hospital (PAH) which aims to provide rapid assessment, planning and treatment for inpatients requiring palliative radiation therapy. Working as part of this team,…

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Joanne Muskett – Workplace Activity Outcome

Registered Nurse - Kingston Community Nursing
Joanne recently completed a placement and on return to her workplace she set about creating a in-service to educate staff on how to set up and manage syringe drivers for patients in their care.  The session…

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Renee Kelly – Placement Reflection

Registered Nurse - Esperance Hospital
Renee attended a PEPA Placement with the goals to learn more about communication in palliative care and end of life care.  Renee observed many instances where communication was focused on patient medication, chemotherapy drugs and uses,…

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Jocelyn Lee – Placement Reflection

Clinical Nurse - Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital
Jocelyn’s goal of placement was to get a ‘birds-eye’ view of metropolitan palliative care providers that patients are referred to in order to better equip myself with external knowledge and be better informed about services in…

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Blake Currie – Placement Outcome

Social Worker - WACHS Kimberley
Blake completed a PEPA placement with a very clear outline of what he wanted the outcome to be.  Blake wanted to to have open discussions about advocacy services for patients and families  so that there is…

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CoPs provide an environment in which professionals can share their practice experiences, develop and discuss areas of interests and build a sense of community (2).

A community of practice was a term first coined by Etienne Wenger, an education practitioner and academic, who described CoP as “Groups of people who share a passion for something that they know how to do and who interact regularly to learn how to do it better”. The successful CoP requires members to be participatory and is essentially led by its members. It is the member’s responsibility to ensure that the CoP stays relevant, engaging and offers value to the domain of interest (3).

CoPs were initially developed to exchange information and knowledge but more recently are being used as tools to improve clinical and public health practice and to facilitate the implementation of evidence-based practice (2). 

In the healthcare field, CoPs have been promoted as a tool to (4):

  • Cross knowledge boundaries (all healthcare workforce)
  • Generate and manage a body of knowledge for members to draw on (palliative care)
  • Promote standardisation of practice (evidenced based palliative care)
  • Innovate and create new ideas, knowledge and practices 

In developing a CoP, Wegner and colleagues identified three key elements to be included (5,6):

  • Community – to enable interactions, discussions, collaborative activities and relationship building (PEPA Community)
  • Shared domain of interest – a shared purpose or goal of the group (palliative care knowledge, skill and confidence)
  • Shared practice i.e. repertoire of resources, techniques, tools, experiences, processes or practice (palliative care).

For more information about the PEPA CoP Terms of Reference (ToR) click the link at the top of this page

As a PEPA participant completes a placement activity their activity overview (PEPA Completion Form 3 – Workplace Activity Report) it will be written to form a Blog by the PEPA Manager in their state and territory and loaded to the PEPA Placement site for you to comment on later.

  1. Wenger E, McDermott R, Snyder W. Cultivating Communities of Practice: a Guide to Managing knowledge (Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA). Amy HI Lee received the MBA degree from the University of British Columbia, Canada, in. 2002.
  2. CDC. Available from: http://www.cdc.gov/phcommunities/resourcekit/intro/index.html
  3. Wenger E, McDermott R, Snyder WM. Seven principles for cultivating communities of practice. Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge. 2002.
  4. Ranmuthugala G, Plumb JJ, Cunningham FC, Georgiou A, Westbrook JI, Braithwaite J. How and why are communities of practice established in the healthcare sector? A systematic review of the literature. BMC health services research. 2011;11(1):273.
  5. Wenger E. Communities of practice: Learning as a social system. Systems thinker. 1998;9(5):2‐3.
  6. Li LC, Grimshaw JM, Nielsen C, Judd M, Coyte PC, Graham ID. Evolution of Wenger’s concept of community of practice. Implementation Science. 2009;4(1):11.

 

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