Collaborative Community Quality Improvement Plan
By March 31, 2022, the South Georgian Bay Ontario Health Team is responsible under our Transfer Payment Agreement to submit a Collaborative Quality Improvement Plan (cQIP) in accordance with Ministry of Health direction, which includes indicators and targets specific to our priority population and broader system integration.
As outlined by Ontario Health, the cQIP is related to, but distinct from, the provincial Quality Improvement Plan (QIP) for individual health care organizations. The cQIP is designed to support multiple partner organizations within an OHT in developing and monitoring common quality improvement activities, whereas the QIP focuses on organization-specific issues. These two documents should ideally be complementary.
The cQIP should support performance objectives, but it is not a performance or accountability tool in the way that a service accountability agreement or transfer payment agreement would be. It is one of many tools that help OHTs promote a culture of quality improvement and it supports the identification of shared quality improvement objectives. Through the cQIP, each OHT is responsible to report on a set of core priorities defined by the Ministry of Health, and is invited to include other local priorities or indicators. A cQIP is intended to be:
- An improvement plan that aligns provincial and local health system priorities with the Quadruple Aim and that considers populations most at risk
- A process that OHTs work on throughout the year to systematically identify and bridge gaps in care, using quality improvement and change management principles and employing an equity lens
For more information on the cQIP structure, please refer to the cQIP Guidance Document.
The process for the development of the South Georgian Bay cQIP was overseen by our SGB OHT Quality Improvement Action Team consisting of representation from across our health system and informed by our Patient Family and Caregiver Advisory Council.
The SGB OHT QI Action Team underwent extensive data review and input from our community to examine our current population health data to develop informed indicators and set achievable improvement targets, which are supported by corresponding change ideas and methods which will continue to evolve.
In the coming year, the SGB OHT QI Action Team will oversee the development, implementation, and evaluation of our cQIP to ultimately deliver an informed quality improvement portfolio and evaluation and monitoring dashboard for our community.
The recommendation from our QI Action Team was to use the cQIP as an opportunity to develop a collaborative quality improvement plan for the community. Therefore, as you will see on the draft cQIP there are a series of indicators beyond those that are mandatory to report on by Ontario Health, which are labeled custom OHT indicator on the draft cQIP.
The intent of including these indicators is to use the cQIP as a central scorecard to evaluate the performance of our Ontario Health Team and to showcase the work of our Action Teams. Much of the work that is captured through the custom indicators is already underway through collaborative partnerships within our OHT.
From a governance and accountability perspective, the SGB OHT QI Action Team recommends that as this is a cQIP for our community, that each individual organization on the SGB OHT Collaboration Council review the indicators that are specified in the cQIP and identify which they can commit to support within their own organization and reflect on their organizational Quality Improvement Plan.