Bringing Together Research and Quality Improvement: The Saskatchewan Approach

Abstract

Improving health and health services requires both better knowledge (a key function of research) and better action to adapt and use what is already known (quality improvement). However, organizational and cultural divides between academic research institutions and health system organizations too often result in missed opportunities to integrate research and improvement. The Saskatchewan Health Quality Council's experience and relationships, from linking research, quality improvement and patient engagement in its leadership of the province's healthcare quality improvement journey, provided core support and leadership in the development of Saskatchewan's Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research SUPPORT Unit. The vision is for the SUPPORT Unit to integrate research and quality improvement into a continuous learning health system. Résumé L'amélioration de la santé et des services de santé exige à la fois une meilleure connaissance (la fonction primaire de la recherche) et une meilleure action pour adapter et utiliser ce que l'on sait déjà (amélioration de la qualité). Cependant, les clivages organisationnels et culturels entre les instituts de recherche universitaires et les organismes du système de santé sont trop souvent responsables de rendezvous manqués entre la recherche et l'amélioration. L'expérience et les relations du Saskatchewan Health Quality Council (pour l'établissement de liens entre la recherche, l'amélioration de la qualité et l'engagement du patient en vue d'orienter le processus d'amélioration de la qualité des soins de santé de la province) ont fourni un soutien et un leadership essentiels au développement de l'unité SOUTIEN de la Stratégie de recherche axée sur le patient de la Saskatchewan. L'objectif que poursuit l'unité SOUTIEN est d'intégrer la recherche et l'amélioration de la qualité à un système de santé apprenant.

Growing a Healthy Ecosystem for Patient and Citizen Partnerships

“…Cette réalité a d'importantes répercussions politiques sur l'avenir de l'engagement des patients et des citoyens au Canada, car elle exige un leadership à tous les niveaux du système de santé, dont une collaboration des gouvernements national et provinciaux avec les établissements et responsables locaux des soins de santé. L'exemple de Teare et Keller (2018), en Saskatchewan, illustre un autre type de carrefour d'engagement (au niveau provincial), qui crée une infrastructure commune entre deux domaines d'engagement (la recherche et l'amélioration de la qualité) afin de faciliter l'apprentissage mutuel et le partage de ressources. En intégrant son unité de soutien à la recherche axée sur le patient (dotée d'un mandat consacré à la recherche sur l'engagement des patients) au sein du Saskatchewan Health Quality Council (qui possède déjà une expertise en matière d'engagement des patients à l'amélioration de la qualité), la Saskatchewan a exploité des ressources existantes (p. ex.…”

Reimagining Community Relationships for Organizational Learning: a Scoping Review With Implications for a Learning Health System

“…Social learning articles de-emphasized organizational structures or boundaries and instead highlighted transformative group processes with all relevant knowledge holders [55,58]. Learning health system documents were the only ones not to consider transformation of underlying group norms, assumptions or behaviour as part of the de nitions they used, though some did acknowledge the importance of human interactions for learning and knowledge dissemination [57,59,60].…”

“…Learning from, and learning with, community Ten (24%) texts suggested that organizational learning could be done with community [22,56,57,60,74,77,[80][81][82][83]. Nine (21%) texts suggested that organizations could learn both from and with the communities they served [52,55,59,64,78,79,[84][85][86].…”

“…Thirty-four (81%) texts went beyond ambiguous references to community participation to provide insight into the nature of knowledge transfer between the community and organization. In 17 of these texts, community knowledge and evidence were described as owing to the organization through direct interaction and relationships, for example through volunteering or board membership [73,81] or participation on advisory councils [57,60]. The authors of six documents spoke about knowledge transfer as a self-reinforcing cycle of learning between the community and organization wherein open, crossboundary dialogue facilitates the ow of ideas [56,65,78,83,94,96].…”

“…The most frequently cited strategy to support organizational learning from or with community, clearly mentioned in 19 (45%) texts, was the maintenance of relationships and social interaction with the external environment [e.g., 56 [57,59,60,64,73]. These strategies are depicted in Fig.…”