Healthy Healthcare: A Workplace Learning Perspective

Lifelong learning, and workplace learning (WPL) in particular, offers healthcare professionals the opportunity to keep their knowledge up-to-date and learn new competencies, which is essential for a Healthy Healthcare. However, healthcare organizations struggle to successfully employ WPL, and informal learning in particular. In this chapter we aim to provide healthcare professionals and their employers with practical guidelines to realize WPL, in order to improve patient care and ensure a Healthy Healthcare. We do so by complementing theoretical insights with insights from exemplary initiatives of WPL. The literature and lessons learned from these initiatives show us that WPL should be facilitated rather than managed. We describe how healthcare organizations can go about facilitating WPL and show how a multi-level (with interventions at the level of the professional, teams, organizations and the professional field) and multi-faced approach show promising results in terms of WPL.