Transformative action coaching in healthcare leadership

The context of this study focuses on the collaborative interest of three organizations devoted to the development of Healthcare leadership in the United Kingdom, namely the National Health Service (NHS), Army Medical Service (AMS), and the University of Cumbria (UoC). Each organization acknowledges the challenges facing healthcare leaders in their pursuit of effect organizational, personal, and professional learning and have come together and bring into play their own organizational learning to collectively design this pilot programme of leadership development that facilitates deep transformative critical self- reflection, reflexivity and learning. The authors have used the theoretical and practical integration of autoethnographic storytelling and arts-based action learning approaches to facilitate such transformative learning in the group setting of professional leadership development programmes. The aim of this study is to add to the growing discourses in the fields of Transformative Learning, Action Learning, Coaching and Autoethnography by critically evaluating the application of this approach when designing and delivering a combined military, university and NHS leadership development program to a cohort of 24 senior leaders within an NHS hospital.