Harmonization in Action

Why Harmonization?

Integrating interventions into day-to-day practice and demonstrating their effectiveness is one of the largest challenges in cancer prevention; however, collaboration has the potential for an improved health dividend by better leveraging individual skills and aligning shared resources. As such, this project not only aims to implement prevention initiatives, but also to understand how strategies to support collaboration can result in better health outcomes in Northern BC and beyond.

Harmonization provides tools to enable effective and sustainable collaboration.

The ultimate goal of the Harmonization project is to deepen our understanding of collaborative processes and identify those things needed for highly effective collaborative projects. Through Harmonization efforts, the Canadian Cancer Society, BC Cancer Agency, and Northern Health will develop the tools needed to engage organizations at national, provincial, and regional levels in processes of sustainable collaboration.

These tools will include a collaborative framework for partners to combine resources for preventative interventions, a collaborative readiness assessment to evaluate the initial conditions for collaboration, and a step-by-step manual to guide the process from start to finish. The development of these resources will help bridge the gap from research to policy, and then from policy to practice. This will be accomplished by the complementary implementation and evaluation of two health interventions – Stop Smoking Before Surgery (SBSS) and Men’s Healthy Eating and Active Living (M-HEAL).

The study of these two programmes will highlight the key factors for effective health collaborations, and inform the development of any collaborative tools produced by the project.