Best of 2022: QI Power Hour sessions

As 2022 comes to an end, it’s a good time to look at the top QI Power Hour sessions from the past year. HQC offers these sessions, with a focus on quality and community improvement, as free monthly webinars.

We started the year off with guest speaker Brandon Bennett, who provided us with the knowledge to make systemic improvements. We continued to look at the basic building blocks, tools and frameworks of quality improvement. Throughout the year we focused on areas that align with our strategy, such as the health of an aging population, First Nations and Métis health and wellness, and the social determinants of health in child and youth mental health and wellness.

If you’d like to stay informed of upcoming QI Power Hour sessions, you can sign up for our QI Power Hour mailing list. If you missed out on the live webinars, recordings of each session are saved on our website so you can catch up on all the great insights – at a time that works for you.

Here are the top 4 QI Power Hour Sessions from 2022

1 . Back to Basics: Standard Work – A Foundational Starting Point for Continuous Improvement

Guest speaker

Jennifer Wright, Improvement Lead, Health Quality Council

Session description

Taiichi Ohno, Japanese industrial engineer, businessman, and father of the Toyota Production System once said, “Without standards, there can be no improvement.” What does this mean? It means if we don’t fully understand how we are doing something or if everyone is doing it differently, how can we expect to make things better? Creating standard work is a fundamental tool used in improvement work that makes it easy for a process to be done consistently, timely and in a repeatable manner.

In this webinar participants will:

Learn how creating standard work supports and accelerates improvement work.
Explore what standard work is and what it isn’t.
Learn tips on how to create and implement standard work.

2. Introduction to Program Evaluation

Guest speakers

Alvin Yapp, Improvement Lead, Health Quality Council

Session description

Program evaluation is increasingly becoming a requirement for grants and funding. It is also good practice to have a plan to evaluate the success of your projects and initiatives. This session will introduce you to the concept of program evaluation and shares resources to help you get started evaluating your own programs.

In this webinar participants will learn:

What program evaluation is and about three approaches to program evaluation (summative, formative and developmental).
The skills and competencies of a program evaluator.
The basics of evaluating a program.
What resources are available to help with conducting a program evaluation.

3. Connecting Measurement and Improvement

Guest speaker

Brandon Bennett, ISC LLC

Session description

Participants can expect to receive an introduction to the kinds of knowledge needed to improve systemic outcomes, how that knowledge is used in practice and how measurement is connected to the improvement journey.

In this webinar participants will:

Identify and distinguish knowledge types necessary to improve systemic outcomes.
Explore systems thinking and its connection to health and education outcomes.
Illustrate how measures can provide insight into the functioning of a whole system.
Understand how to measure when pursuing project level outcomes for a system.

4. What Matters to Older Adults? Rethinking Care in Aging and Older Adults

Session description
July’s QI Power Hour features two Saskatchewan organizations focused on supporting older adults and senior care, Saskatchewan Seniors Mechanism and the Saskatoon Council on Aging. In this panel-style presentation, participants will:

Hear from the Saskatchewan Seniors Mechanism about its Home Supports Initiative, a multi-pronged effort based on previous research about what older adults need to “age well” in their communities.
Learn about the Saskatoon Council on Aging’s research initiatives and their expertise in older adult engagement (most recently on the impact of COVID-19) and what older people say about their health-care experiences.
Have an opportunity for discussion with representatives from both groups.

Stay up to date with QI Power Hour

Do you want to become a part of a growing community of improvers in Saskatchewan and beyond? Subscribe to our QI Power Hour mailing list to stay in the know about upcoming sessions, and be the first to receive links to recordings and materials from sessions that you miss!

Have questions, or want to profile your work on an upcoming QI Power Hour? We’d love to hear from you!