This case study briefly describes the challenges the team at Guys and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust working on the Health Foundation’s Co-creating Health programme experienced in recruiting health professionals to training in self-management support. It sets out how they developed different approaches to primary and secondary care.

Initially training was ‘open to all’, but the team found this approach meant it was difficult for individuals to engage their wider team in using a more collaborative approach. As a result they started to target training: in primary care, training was offered on a ‘whole practice’ basis and could be held at the practice; in secondary care training was offered to whole teams. The number and timing of sessions was flexed to enable more people to attend eg 3 lots of 2 hour sessions, or 2 lots of 3 hour sessions.