Q&A: Catching up with attendees at the Shared Care Partners in Care event

The Shared Care team sat down with attendees at the Shared Care Partners in Care event in Victoria, on October 17, 2024. Dr Cal Shapiro, Dr Stuart Bax, and April Bonise met with the Shared Care team to provide insights into their experience at this quality improvement-focused conference.

Shared Care (SC): Thank you for taking the time to chat with us today. Firstly, were there any “a-ha!” moments for you today?

Dr Cal Shapiro (CS): For me, it was the magnitude of people involved in this work. Our conversations have mostly been with David (David Hebb, Initiative Liaison) but we’ve not been in this larger setting. Seeing so many people around the room who have had success spreading and finishing successful projects—it’s really powerful, knowing it’s such a large community.

Dr Stuart Bax (SB): It’s just always nice to see a lot of passionate people. Working where we do, we often work in silos, even in family practice settings where we have multiple family doctors working on the same side, we’re often only doing our own panels. So, these types of events bring us all together. There’s some Physician Quality Improvement (PQI)-Shared Care-Spreading Quality Improvement overlay, and certainly the connections and the passion are paramount in both settings.

April Bonise (AB): Mine was with Dr Sarah Lea and her conversation and insights about how we prioritize time. From my side of things, because I support physicians, it was insightful for me to hear how, even though I’m trying to respect their time by suggesting meetings at 7 pm or early in the morning, it’s more burdensome to them. So that insight has allowed me to shift how I will have conversations going forward.

SC: From your individual perspectives, what have you seen as a key theme(s) out of today’s session?

SB: Encouraging communication. I think that’s the right message—we must communicate better. All these projects are about engagement and communication more than anything else, and I think that’s probably rightfully so. Without communication, everyone continues doing what they’re doing, and we never improve or progress.

CS: For me, there were several talks that brought this up: the concept that you need to collect data if you’re going to make any meaningful change. Stakeholders don’t care if you can’t present them something that’s tangible and not full of anecdotes. Many of these projects do start off in a way that’s a bit more relaxed and haphazard, and you develop that expertise as you go. For us, we were doing QI at the same time as Shared Care. Our projects completely overlapped, so we were getting some of the data training on the side, and we can then apply it to an active Shared Care project.

AB: I would have said data because data tells a story, and everybody loves a good story. But to get data and to get communication, you must start with connections and then the foundation of that is the relationship. I noticed even in the case studies that we did today, the first question was: “how would each additional stakeholder contribute to building the connections to the other community partners?” And that just tells me that, without that relational piece, the work can’t move forward. People over process every time.

CS: To that point, if you don’t do the initial engagement with the right people, you’re not necessarily asking the right questions. We made some interventions in our work before asking the right questions, and then you find out six months later that, if you’re asking the wrong question, are you barking up the wrong tree?

SC: Were there any key takeaways from today that you see yourself implementing in your Shared Care or QI work?

SB: We’re going to be trying to spread our project, so the spread message is resonating. It’s all about having these little projects and their successes. We need to make sure the news gets out and not replicate it.

AB: Our team is going to make use of the PQI Coaches. One of the challenges that we’ve had in our EOI phases is that we spend some time trying to build buy-in and then you’re trying to rush to put something together at the end of that. So, if we can utilize the expertise of a coach to help us with those: the buy-in piece, the gap identification, what matters to each person—I think that’ll just make things faster.

CS: Circling back to data, we’ve got four or five main streams in the service we’re offering where we’re collecting data well, but another two or three areas where we aren’t collecting as well. This means we must go back to the drawing board for those and say, “now we have to collate a year’s worth of data backwards and develop systems to make sure we’re doing it on a regular basis going forward.” All three respondents added the ability to network with colleagues was invaluable. The opportunity to match faces with names, learn from each other’s expertise, and have 200-plus people with a shared passion for quality improvement and health system innovation in the same room were important aspects of the event.

Dr Stuart Bax and Dr Cal Shapiro are co-physician leads of the CanScreen project. April Bonise is the project lead for the Creating a Transgender Care Project EOI: Learning Through Humility project.