Evaluation Report: Learning Collaborative - Improving Cancer Screening Rates

The Learning Collaborative (LC) is a short-term learning system that brings together peers from multiple organizations to seek improvement in a focused topic area, with guidance from a coach or practice facilitator. This approach was developed by the Institute for Health Information (IHI)’s Collaborative Model for Achieving Breakthrough Improvement.

The Alliance for Healthier Communities planned and implemented its first LC in 2021, with teams participating from ten Community Health Centres and three Aboriginal Health Access Centres. The first objective of this collaborative was to build quality improvement (QI) knowledge and skills among participating teams. The second objective was to improve cancer screening rates impacted by the COVID-19 backlog by applying QI theory, tools and resources.

Evaluation of this LC was embedded throughout to answer two key questions:

1. Was the learning collaborative implemented as intended?
2. Did the learning collaborative meet its intended objectives?

This report relays a summary of key findings, a description of how the LC was implemented, and detailed results of our evaluation. It also highlights recommendations shared by participating teams and adopted to improve ongoing and future LCs.