I was delighted to be asked to write this tribute to Professor Angie Titchen, focusing on her contribution to practice development, as I consider Angie to be one of my closest friends and colleagues and someone who has been a critical companion since we first met in 1991.

Angie is well known in the world of nursing, but most of the people who know her and her work probably don’t either realise or think about the fact that she is a physiotherapist – not that the specific professional orientation matters, but it is a reflection of the respect in which she is held among nurses that she is awarded the status of ‘honorary nurse’!

Angie’s commitment to emancipatory and transformational approaches to learning and development began in her physiotherapy days, when she transformed the teaching and learning programmes in her role as education officer in the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists. This experience is what led to her being recruited by Dr Sue Pembrey to the Institute of Nursing, Oxford, to lead the research into ‘patient-centred nursing’ that was being developed by Alison Binnie at the city’s John Radcliffe Hospital. Alison’s work was considered to be transformational, but it needed an evidence base. Angie partnered her in an integrated transformational journey of learning, development and evaluation through the lens of action research and phenomenology. Angie’s evaluation was complex, creative, rigorous, systematic, detailed and groundbreaking. The key output of the programme, Freedom to practise: the development of patient-centred nursing (Binnie and Titchen, 1999) is generally considered to be a seminal text and in many ways was ahead of its time, as it is truly a text about person-centred nursing in all its glory! The phenomenological analysis also resulted in the development of the Critical Companionship and Skilled Companionship frameworks and I had the pleasure of accompanying Angie on that journey while we studied together for our doctorates at the University of Oxford. Many an evening over many glasses of wine was spent debating and unpacking those frameworks!

This article by Brendan McCormack is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 License.