This fellowship spurs from a curiosity about the intricacies of relationships and how we (diverse teams) ‘go on together’ to collaborate with patients and families and second, an assumption of the impact that relationships have on wellness and healing. I am not only speaking about wellbeing for our patients and families, I include people and teams within our organization and extend this notion to include our community partners. What an extraordinary journey both personally and professionally, thank-you Registered Nurses Association of Ontario (RNAO). Each day is an invitation to reflect on the responsibility that I have in creating collaborative, positive and appreciative relational experiences with our patients, families and teams.

RNAO’s six key domains of Interprofessional health care (care expertise, shared power, collaborative leadership, optimizing profession, role and scope, shared decision making and effective group functioning) are premised on constructs of relationship. Each domain emphasizes the explicit and implicit value of trust, mutual respect, diversity and inclusiveness, as well the structures (leadership, co-operation, communication) that support collaboration (RNAO, 2013). Stutsky and Spence Laschinger (2014, p. 2) herald “relational skills” a precursor to Interprofessional Collaborative Practice. My learning focuses on a lens of scholarship that concentrates on research and practice committed to understand the value of relational processes and their implication on social reality (Collaborative Models of Care).

The most important aspect of my fellowship centres on developing knowledge and skills to apply the theoretical underpinnings of Appreciative Inquiry (AI). Not only is my learning an attempt to ascertain the life centric forces of collaborative care with one unit in our hospital, I hope this collective experience is seen as a vital and inspiring “disruption” that holds promise for this small system to self-organize, embrace emergent change and create a future of collaborative care that is local and contextual in shared meaning and knowledge (Bushe, 2015, p. 1).