Evaluating Partnership - Setting a Low Bar?
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Just reading an article re: BC Renal's "successful" patient and family "engagement" strategy - and I find myself struggling a little with how success is defined.
Over five years their network membership increased from 61 to 139 - which is wonderful - though membership is essentially defined as those on the mailing list.
Over the same time they gained 5 active members and lost 4, so a net gain of 1, resulting in a total of 25. Which is disappointing, though at least stable.
Except that the definition of active membership is the completion of an orientation session - so there's no data on how many have been involved in partnership activities. Their paper in Healthcare Management Forum doesn't include that data either.
While I applaud BC Renal for their efforts and intent, I can't help but wonder if condoning such a low bar for success simply enables organizations to tick the engagement box to receive funding and then move on.
I hope that's not the case. Would welcome other perspectives or comments
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@Chris-Johnston I would need to read the report in detail before I can comment further however, we will be doing a research evaluation of our Patient Family Donor Platform for the Canadian Donation Transplant Research Program, on our progress today. Our Ontario Health Teams will be doing this as well to measure patient engagement and will be using the Engage with Impact Toolkit from The Public and Patient Engagement Collaborative out of McMaster.
Definitely interesting research that needs to be done To show the impact that patients and caregiver partners have on improving healthcare.
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@Sandra-Holdsworth I like the look of the toolkit and would love to learn more about your experience of using it. I think it would help immensely to have something concrete to refer to or recommend when the topic arises.
Actually, I think your experience of evaluations, and the comparison of using the toolkit vs not, would make a fantastic topic for a webinar! -
@Chris-Johnston You raise an excellent question about metrics used for evaluting partnerships and patient engagement programs. 100% agree that # registered is a starting point , yet low bar for an indicator of program performance or impact. The same question has come up in NS with our Health Authority Patient Family Advisor Program. the # 'registered " is highlighted with little on how many are actually participating etc..Time to encourage better more meaningful measurement of impact
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@Donna-Rubenstein @Chris-Johnston donna would some of this data be involved in the survey that we just did. Measuring impact of patient caregiver partner engagement is hard and there’s not really a lot of data on it. It’s difficult to to find the right tool. We can evaluate ourselves using our strategic plan and seeing how we were doing. I think we might need to come up with metrics that we want to measure but as both you and Kris have said, this is definitely important.
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@Sandra-Holdsworth @Donna-Rubenstein Absolutely agree that metrics are hard - though I think the BC Renal report could have tried a little harder - even reporting how many research projects involved patient partners, and how many patient partners were attached quality improvement and governance initiatives would have been more acceptable than how many are registered or on the mailing list.
It makes me wonder if PAN couldn't start the ball rolling with a survey that we could use across PAN members as a pilot, but then recommend that organizations use to measure their own level of partnership. Questions like -
- how many research projects have you been involved in over the past 1/3/5 years
how many - what was the highest level of involvement experienced (ref IAP2 levels)
- what non-research activities have you been involved in (quality improvement, governance, advisory groups etc.)
And so on - I'm sure we could brainstorm about 10 key questions that would give us a pretty good picture of how patient partners are currently involved.
We could also use it as an opportunity to identify the organizations most actively involving patient partners. I think that would make an interesting project, that could result in a useful tool, and possibly a paper on the topic. - how many research projects have you been involved in over the past 1/3/5 years
