Table 1 Composition and purpose of establishing communities of practice in the healthcare sector, by setting and in chronological order of publication*
Year paper published | Settings | Why was the CoP established or what relevance did the CoP have to the research?†| Reference |
|---|---|---|---|
A. Multi-organisation or multi-professional (n = 25) | |||
   a. Learning, information and knowledge exchange (n = 12) | |||
1999 | Ten hospital and community-based healthcare organisations | The CoP concept was used to explore the process by which novice clinicians acquired competencies. | [27] |
2002 | Urologists, radiation oncologists, physicians and nurses delivering in-hospital cancer treatment. | CoPs were used as a tool to enrol key professionals and create, mobilise, diffuse and integrate knowledge relating to a radical innovation. | [24] |
2002 | Agencies involved in the delivery of local services for the elderly, and providers of dental and ENT services. | CoPs were established to help facilitate inter-agency collaboration. | [20] |
2003 | Members from agencies involved in delivering local services for the elderly, and service users. | The construction and work of two multi-stakeholder CoPs was facilitated to understand the acquisition and use of knowledge to help improve services. | [16] |
2004 | General practitioners, practice nurses and associated medical staff in two general practices | Researchers set out to understand how clinicians derive and use knowledge in practice. The fact that clinicians relied on their CoPs to obtain information was a finding. | [17] |
2005 | Anaesthetic teams consisting of novice or trainee nurses and doctors, and experienced operation-department practitioners and consultants. | The concept of legitimate peripheral participation in CoPs was used to explore the distribution of work and knowledge within anaesthetic teams. | [18] |
2006 | Researchers, practitioners, and policy makers with interests in web-assisted tobacco interventions. | A group of diverse professionals from geographically-dispersed locations were brought together to lay the foundations for a CoP. | [45] |
2006 | Anaesthetists from ten anaesthetic departments. | The online system created a CoP within which participants could anonymously post critical incidents for discussion. | [22] |
2007 | Collaborative relationship between the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, hospital insurance provider, and/or the provincial government and participating hospital. | The obstetric patient-safety program was based on principles of team effort, CoPs and organisational behaviour. | [32] |
2008 | Clinical nurse consultants, educators and managers of intensive care units. | The email Listserv led to a sense of community and the creation of a CoP, facilitating the exchange of information. | [42] |
2008 | Senior clinical managers | Emergence of CoPs was one of many effects on clinical practice reported in the paper. | [23] |
(Note: Reference number 23 has been included in the multi-organisation or multi-professional category for the following reasons: i) The authors stated that the general composition of the clinical leadership program was 10% allied health professionals and 90% senior clinical nursing staff; ii) The authors also stated that the leadership program had, over three years, supported over 100 staff working for NHS Lanarkshire. Given that there is more than one hospital within this county, it is possible that the program participants were not necessarily co-located within the one service unit.) | |||
2009 | Clinicians working in nine rural and two urban paediatric emergency departments. | A virtual community of practice was established to facilitate knowledge exchange. | [29] |
   b. Sharing and promoting good practice/evidence-based practice (n = 13) | |||
2004 | Healthcare workers and researchers with an interest in evidence-based care. | Virtual CoPs emerged spontaneously as people identified common interests. | [21] |
2004 | State and local public health agencies engaged in child health-information system-integration projects. | A CoP was created to bring together a diverse group of professionals from geographically-dispersed agencies to learn from each other, to capture best practices and to collaboratively address challenges. | [39] |
2005 | Practising nurses in gerontology and academics (Nursing Demonstration Project). | The CoP provided a tool to bridge the divide between practising nurses and academics. The CoP was also involved in developing best-practice statement methodology and in designing a virtual college. | [19] |
2005 | Practising nurses in gerontology and academics (Nursing Demonstration Project). | The potential of the CoP and the virtual college to accelerate the achievements of evidence-based practice was explored. | [46] |
2006 | Nine healthcare systems and ten hospitals represented. | The intervention to reduce hospital-acquired infections was multifaceted and included developing a CoP. | [37] |
2007 | Emergency department clinicians from multiple hospitals. CoP is partnership between the ED clinicians and the National Institute of Clinical Studies, which provides implementation expertise and support. | An emergency department (ED) collaborative was established and was successful in engaging clinicians from 47 hospital ED teams from across the country. This led to a network of clinicians interested in improving uptake of evidence, leading to the establishment of an ED CoP. The CoP acted as a mechanism that built on the knowledge and expertise of the clinicians to implement evidence-based practice. | [40] |
2007 | Representatives from the family physician, physiotherapy and occupational therapy licensing Boards; and clinician associations, observers from the compensation board and its research institute. Experts and opinion leaders on low back pain. Scientific committee. | A CoP approach was used to develop clinical guidelines. | [34] |
2007 | Researchers and program providers who work on improving telephone-based counselling for smoking cessation. | The CoP model was used to improve telephone-based counselling for smoking cessation. | [31] |
2008 | Journal club and case conferences attended by physicians and other clinicians from Internal Medicine, Neuroradiology, Anaesthesiology, Otology/Head and Neck Surgery, Dermatology, And Ophthalmology Departments. | The CoP concept was used to structure continuous medical education accredited journal clubs and case conferences to be interactive and problem-based, with the objective of increasing the likelihood of physicians implementing evidence-based care. | [36] |
2008 | Diverse stakeholders, including hospitals, non-profit organisations and city agencies, working together to improve cancer screening in community health centres. | The community health centres did not have the capacity to provide care for people with abnormal screening tests and cancer diagnosis, nor did they have partnerships with available community resources. Local CoPs were established to address this gap. Regional CoPs were established to provide forums on a wider scale geographically, for sharing ideas, identifying resources, and encouraging action on local community building efforts. | [38] |
2008 | Five acute hospital wards, six home-care, and seven day hospitals. | The intervention to promote evidence-based practice included membership of a CoP. | [26] |
2009 | Health and social-care communities to address problems with discharge planning and transfer of care. | CoP was established to test whether the bringing together of a wide range of staff, with a shared interest, would make a meaningful contribution to sustainable service improvement. | [15] |
2009 | Children's mental health practitioners (frontline social workers, child and youth workers) working in six service-provider organisations, newly-mandated to use the standardised outcome measurement tool. | Support structure provided to help implement the adoption of an electronic version of a standardised outcome measurement tool included access to a CoP. | [28] |
B. Single-organisation or single profession (n = 6) | |||
   a. Learning, information and knowledge exchange (n = 2) | |||
2000 | Nurses with little research experience | The workshop provided the nurses access to a CoP where they could work with experienced researchers. | [35] |
2002 | Small group of physicians | The concept of CoP was used to examine the learning that occurred within small groups of physicians. | [33] |
   b. Sharing and promoting evidence-based practice/promoting innovation in clinical practice/supporting clinical practitioners (n = 4) | |||
2007 | Occupational therapists working in a large metropolitan hospital. | The CoP was proposed as a tool to support occupational therapists reflecting on how their profession is conceptualised and described, and to define their unique contribution to patient care within a biomedically-dominated institutional context. | [43] |
2007 | Hospital setting. | The clinical planning group had characteristics of CoPs. | [44] |
2008 | Cancer surgery. | The CoP was established and endorsed as a means of facilitating quality improvement. | [30] |
2009 | General practitioners. | CoP was established to address the quality of referral letters. | [41] |
C. Systematic reviews (n = 2) | |||
2009 | Healthcare sector. | Systematic review of CoPs in business and healthcare sectors. | [11] |
2009 | Regional collaborations and CoPs within the surgical settings. | The rationale for undertaking the systematic review was the need to investigate whether the CoP concept could be implemented through collaborative initiatives. | [14] |