Background: Three central North Island District Health Boards developed a collaborative partnership to create an education framework to improve workplace learning by nurses. A Joint Nursing Speciality Education Project Group was formed to explore frameworks and models of care that would support and enhance nursing practice.

Aims and objectives: The aim of this article is to reflect critically on the process of leading the project group during the development of a nursing framework that would encompass a holistic view of education and meet the needs of each participating health board. The article also examines the issues encountered, which included the difficulties of working with nurses from different organisations in different geographical locations.

Conclusions and implications for practice: The process of developing the Person-Whānau (Family) Centred Nursing Framework was a team effort and working collaboratively across health boards has been extremely rewarding. We faced workload and geographical challenges in trying to get the whole group together but the chance to develop a framework that has the ability to improve patient outcomes has been exciting and the relationships we have forged along the way with members of the project group have been positive.

This article by Wendy Blair and Sue Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 License.