About the Engage with Impact Toolkit
Health systems in Canada, and around the world, are actively involving, and partnering with, patients, families and caregivers to plan, design, deliver and fund their health systems with the goal of providing those most affected by these decisions with meaningful opportunities to shape them.
As patient, family and caregiver engagement becomes more firmly embedded in health systems, our interest in understanding how well we are doing has led to more emphasis on evaluation. We have a good handle on how to evaluate the the basics of patient, family and caregiver engagement process, but our understanding of the outputs, outcomes and impacts of PE initiatives in policy making, organizational design and health system governance is much less developed.
A number of frameworks and tools have been developed to support the evaluation of patient, family and caregiver engagement, but few of these frameworks provide explicit feedback on how to measure the impact of patient, family and caregiver engagement within health systems (Boivin et al. 2018). The Engage for Impact Toolkit aims to fill this gap.
What is the Engage with Impact Toolkit?
The Engage with Impact Toolkit has been developed for a wide range of health system organizations to support evaluations that focus on assessing the impact of their patient, family and caregiver engagement work.
The Toolkit was developed by a Working Group of patient, family and caregiver partners, health researchers, patient engagement leads and government personnel who worked between February 2020 and October 2021. Leadership and technical support was provided by the Public and Patient Engagement Collaborative at McMaster University, led by Dr. Julia Abelson. Please see here for more information about how the Toolkit was developed.
We expect patient partners, as well as patient engagement leads, in a wide range of organizations and networks, to be key users of this resource. No organization should be undertaking this type of evaluation work without patient partners on their evaluation team.
The Engage with Impact Toolkit is not a how-to guide for patient engagement. There are already many excellent resources on this topic (some of these are listed in the resource module).
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Important note: When we discuss the evaluation of patient engagement, we are not suggesting that we need to evaluate the individual patient partners who are engaged in this work. Rather, we aim to evaluate the overall impact of the engagement process – including how the interactions between patient partners and others led to changes in the process, what was different due to these interactions – and how the outcome of the process led to changes within the health system.
Meet the Evaluating Patient Engagement Working Group
Public and Patient Engagement Collaborative
Julia Abelson
Lead
Laura Tripp
Coordinator
Grace Kuang
Website Designer
Maggie MacNeil
Methods Support
Rana Saleh
Working Group Support
Jeonghwa You
Working Group Support
Claire Dawe-McCord
Patient Partner
Carol Fancott
Health Excellence Canada
Kevin French
Ministry of Health
Anna Gagliardi
University of Toronto
Rebecca Ganann
McMaster University
Jenny Gilbert
Ontario Health
Marisa Granieri
Patient Partner
Cathie Hofstetter
Patient Partner
Anne Hayes
Ministry of Health
Bernice King
Patient Partner
Betty-Lou Kristy
Minister's PFAC
Amy Lang
Ontario Health
Michelle MacKinnon
Ministry of Health
Bradley Mannell
Ministry of Health
Alies Maybee
Patient Partner
Robert Paul
University of Toronto
Jessica Riehm
Ministry of Health
Sakina Rizvi
Ministry of Health
Zahava Rosenberg-Yunger
Ryerson University
Kerseri Scane
University Health Network
Maureen Smith
Patient Partner
Susan Tkachuk
Patient Partner
Emre Yurga
Ministry of Health
Working Group Members
The Engage with Impact Toolkit is dedicated to working group members Anya Humphrey and Randy Filinski, who were both strong advocates for the importance of patient, family and caregiver engagement and of this work.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. It may be used for educational purposes and for use in public sector organizations. It may not be used for commercial purposes or product marketing.
Translations of the Engage with Impact Toolkit may be undertaken in consultation with the leadership of the Public and Patient Engagement Collaborative.
You must provide attribution to the creator when the Engage with Impact Toolkit is used and shared. All attributions must be the following statement: “The Engage with Impact Toolkit has been licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. © 2021, Public and Patient Engagement Collaborative. McMaster University. All rights reserved.”
The Engage with Impact Toolkit is a generic tool designed primarily to help organizations assess the impact of their engagement activities. The authors do not take responsibility for the improper use of the Engage with Impact Toolkit.