Assessing Continuous Quality Improvement in Public Health: Adapting Lessons from Healthcare

Price, Alex; Schwartz, Robert; Cohen, Joanna; Manson, Heather; Scott, Fran

"The fact that none of them work cooperatively, the fact that there are turf wars and all that good stuff, I think is one of the challenges." -Ministry informant "I think there is a lot of similarities between health units. We talked a lot." -Site-B informant "We work really well with our partners so we can capitalize on limited resources and make the most of them so that again we can really accomplish the goals we set out for communities and make our communities healthier places to be. So we do a lot of collaborative work with other health units but also with our community partners as well in order to accomplish public health goals." -Site-A informant Within the structural dimension, the lack or limited use of communication mechanisms related to the quality improvement initiative fosters an inability to produce knowledge and diffuse it within systems. Ambiguity relating to how information would be fed back to public health units and used for quality improvement was apparent and highlighted by local informants: