Background and aims: The Aspire to Inspire practice development programme took place in the services within one region of an aged care provider in Australia. One year after it ended, the programme team looked back to see how practice development is faring in the region.

Method: In this paper, we present a two part reflection one year on. We have drawn on individual reflections written by the programme team facilitators, and on the Person-Centred Care Framework.

Conclusion: We found that strong values and beliefs were still present, especially among the programme facilitators and others who had been active in the practice development programme. We also found that a systematic approach and the use of facilitation in everyday work were still valued and that project team members were using a wide range of practice development methods, tools and processes in their new roles. We also found, unsurprisingly, that a wide scale organisational redesign weighed heavily on people, influencing their thinking and feeling about work and their commitment to the job. In summary – and this is tentative – more programmes and projects need to revisit how successful practice development has been in sustaining itself and its impact after formal programmes are completed.

Implications for practice: There are implications for practice developers in terms of designing evaluation research and strategies. We found that although practice developers do seem to be more resilient than others during organisational redesign, major changes of this nature have a negative impact on the sustainability of practice development.

This article by Jan Dewing, Anna-Marie Harmon and Jane Nolan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 License.