Le May, A. (2009). Communities of practice in health and social care. Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell.
This book examines how communities of practice (CoPs) in health and social care can make service development and quality improvement easier to initiate and more sustainable. The authors draw on case studies from the UK and Canada, showing how the theory of CoPs is implemented in the delivery of health and social care and highlighting the associated potential, complexities, advantages and disadvantages of CoPs. The methods used in the book are described in the methodological postscript to the introductory chapter, including ethnographic methods which set out to describe the day-to-day activities of primary care practice, focusing in particular on how clinicians use knowledge in their interactions with patients, carers and colleagues. The first part of the book introduces the concept of communities of practice and their relevance to health and social care. They argue that CoPs are ideal mechanisms through which people can discuss the best ways to implement knowledge to suit their local practices or patients and can lead to improvement in the quality of care that they can give. CoPs can function as face-to-face or as virtual communities. In the second part of the book, a range of contributors discuss their stories of starting CoPs. Part three explores how CoPs contribute (or not) to professional and patient capital, and the final part discusses the potential impact of CoPs for health and social care.