The papers in this practice development section focus on the approach of appreciative inquiry (AI) as an important methodology to consider in practice development in health care. This series of papers is timely and written by some of the lead researchers in this field. Appreciative inquiry is an approach to research and development that looks at what is working well, and asks us to consider processes to help these strengths of the organisation happen more of the time. It seems that we are constantly identifying problems with practice and sharing poor practice examples, which often blame nurses for these problems. There are many good things happening in the world of older people care practice both at a nursing and multidisciplinary level, and more attention needs to be paid to this so we can understand at a much deeper-level what works well and why. Furthermore, approaches to research in caring and change initiatives have tended to focus on the barriers to caring and what needs to be fixed to make it better, rather than a proper systematic analysis of what works well.
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