The Communities of Practice model was chosen to improve and reinforce collaboration among community partnerships at the intersection of health care and public health to address population health outcomes through the cancer lens. Since 2018, the American Cancer Society has worked with the Community of Practice sites to refine the approach and create strong community partnerships to support population health outcomes.
In the Communities of Practice (COP) approach, representatives from hospital systems, local and/or state health departments, the ACS, and selected community organizations partnered to develop overall shared goals and annual project aims. The HSCB Initiative identified 20 COP sites over the first two years of the initiative.
The organizational representatives for COP sites worked together to determine appropriate collaborative action plan activities to implement evidence-based and informed approaches. Then they developed collaborative action plans to implement cancer screening using evidence-based and informed interventions that were evaluated to generate data that could be used for tracking progress.
The Establishing A Community of Practice to Enhance Training and Technical Assistance resource linked below provides more detail on how to develop and benefit from a community of practice.
Establishing A Community of Practice to Enhance Training and Technical Assistance
This resource was born out of the expansive set of resources created by the National Resource Center between 2002 and 2009 when they provided training and technical assistance to 1,277 grantees of the Compassion Capital Fund (CCF), administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.