Collaborative Quality Improvement Plan (cQIP)
A Collaborative Quality Improvement Plan (cQIP) is a formal commitment to quality that an Ontario Health Team (OHT) makes to its community.
cQIPs include specific areas of improvement, goals and the ways in which OHT partners will work together to meet these goals. They are an important part of how OHTs deliver higher quality, more integrated care to the communities they serve.
cQIPs are especially important given the COVID-19 pandemic, which has significantly affected how people find and get care. Delays in care have resulted in missed routine preventative care, postponed surgeries, poor management of complex and chronic diseases, as well as other issues that affect patients, caregivers and care providers. COVID-19 has also worsened existing health inequities for racialized and vulnerable populations.
Our early cQIP work
In October 2020, East Toronto Health Partners (ETHP) agreed on its first-ever cQIP initiative for 2020/21. it was developed through a series of discussions among ETHP member organizations, as well as patient and caregiver advisors, starting in late 2019.
After reviewing many potential quality indicators for their applicability in our context as an OHT, ETHP selected patient and family experience as our initial measure: “Percent of persons/families who were satisfied with their involvement in planning of care planning and treatment.” This measure was well aligned with our Best Practice Guidelines implementation for Person- and Family-Centred Care as part of our BPSO OHT commitment with the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario (RNAO).
Our cQIP for 2022/23
Starting in spring 2022, all OHTs, including ETHP, must develop, submit and implement a cQIP.
Our cQIP aims to:
- Identify improvement opportunities in collaboration with patients, caregivers and community members;
- Create shared quality goals and align quality improvement efforts across OHT partners to demonstrate equitable health outcomes;
- Support a culture of quality improvement across partners.
As an OHT, we have set a goal to become a Rapid-Learning Health System where frontline providers, patients and caregivers work side-by-side with experts in research and evaluation to assess, learn and implement care improvements in real-time. Our cQIP is an example of our Rapid-Learning Health System in practice.
East Toronto working groups have been established with patients, caregivers and care providers to identify barriers & improvement opportunities related to cancer screening, alternate level of care (ALC) and mental health and addictions. These are three areas of improvement that were mandated for all OHTs, announced in summer 2021.
Together, we have also set measurable, attainable goals for these areas that will help keep our OHT accountable while further enabling learning and strategy-building across our partnership. Learn more about our cQIP for 2022/23.