Great to meet everyone on Wednesday. For those who could no attend the
afternoon was devoted to thinking about how the Tufton group could
progress. Having been a place where people with a general interest in
complexity could meet, present ideas, discuss there was a feeling at Exeter
that it needed to grow and move on.
We talked through the idea of forming a co-operative inquiry to explore
complexity and primary care in deeper ways. This would not replace all of
the previous kinds of events but would be a means to deepen our
understanding of the issues.
The idea would be that at each meeting we would agree a number of things
that some or all of us would do, in our everyday working or personal lives,
to test out some aspect of complexity. Such a change might be small or
large but we would deliberately seek to be open and reflective about all
the things that flow from the change - what it felt like, unexpected
consequences, what colleagues or patients felt about it, why it seemed to
work in some ways or times and not others etc. The stories and information
flowing from this would a. be discussed here on the e-group and b. be
discussed at the next meeting in Tufton St.

Clearly to do this process justice will take time at Tufton meetings -
however there was also a strong feeling that the co-operative inquiry
(however it turns out) should not take up all  the time of hte group. It
was also strongly felt that those who were not at the meeting on 28th
should be completely included and  begin participating in the inquiry as
and when they wanted to.

There are lots of things that you could call this process - going round the
Kolb learning cycle for example - and co-operative inquiry may not be the
right frame in which to progress - however the overall feeling was  strong
desire to find ways to deepen our understanding of and skills in using
 complexity.
We split into  three groups  to consider different possible areas for
experimentation: the doctor-patient interaction, organisations and research
- and each came up with some proto- possibilities of things  they might try
out doing. Given the time constraints these may well need further tweaking
and development via the e-group, but they represent an encouraging start.
Each group  undertook to  report these suggestions via this discussion
group and I will report the suggestions from the doctor-patient group in a
separate email.

For myself this feels like an interesting and important departure - whether
it is right for us will no doubt emerge!
Paul


Paul Hodgkin
Primary Care Futures
21 Briar Rd, Sheffield S7 1SA
tel: 079 46463698
email: [log in to unmask]