The Dutch government commissioned the Maasland Hospital of the Orbis Medical and Treatment Group to develop the 'Hospital of the 21st Century'. In 2006, the board of Orbis and the board of Zuyd University of Applied Sciences signed an agreement to join forces for this development. Part of this collaboration is the project Patient Centred Treatment (PCT). The objectives of the project are to develop a mental model for PCT with core categories and subcategories, values and behavioural guidelines, and to develop learning activities that change the actual behaviour and knowledge flows of medical professionals at their workplace. The practice based research design is based on the naturalistic/constructivistic research methodology, with elements of grounded theory. The key characteristic of this design research is to explore and evaluate the implicit knowledge in the organization by means of iterative dialogues among professionals and between professionals and researchers. Within this process of co-creation among up to 200 participants, consensus based 'best practices' are developed. This practice based research approach organically runs into action learning activities that serve to anchor PCT at the workplace. As a result, consensus based core categories and subcategories of PTC (patient, guest, person; cognition, emotion, self-esteem) have been developed, consensus based values and behavioural guidelines derived form the core categories and subcategories have been described, and training activities and action learning activities for PCT have been introduced at the workplace. In terms of learning as a result of the project, the individual professionals, the teams of professionals and the organization is developing into a learning organization.
