Community of Practice meeting. 31/8/2011, ITM Antwerp

ASSESSING PERFORMANCE OF COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE: AN INTERNATIONAL MEETING. 31/8/2011, ITM Antwerp
An event to present the framework, collect comments and move towards both an empirical research and self-evaluation agenda for CoPs.

The implementation of policies remains a huge challenge in many low-income countries. Several factors play a role in this, but improper management of existing knowledge is no doubt a major issue. In a recent paper (Meessen et al 2011), we have argued that new knowledge platforms should be created. The ideal platform should gather all the stakeholders who hold pieces of relevant knowledge for successful policies. We think that the Community of Practice (CoP) strategy could represent a useful tool in this sense. 

Currently, this view is still mainly a hypothesis. We have some successful experiences with two CoPs - both in health care financing - but this is certainly not enough to confirm the validity of the strategy in international health. Furthermore, as facilitators, we are certainly biased; our definition of a success is also still very vague. If CoPs become a mainstream strategy in Knowledge Management (KM) in international health, this may have major repercussions on our daily work as experts or scholars. We have to be sure that the time investment is worthwhile. Donors, governments and agencies supporting the strategy also need evidence of its effectiveness.

 With the support of the FEMhealth project (FP7, European Commission) and UNICEF (WCARO), the ITM team is currently developing a framework to assess performance of international CoPs. It is expected that this framework will become a helpful reference for the CoPs supported by Harmonization for Health in Africa (HHA). Within FEMhealth, we will apply it to the documentation of the financial access CoP. The framework will probably be also useful for assessing effectiveness of other KM strategies (networks, newsletters etc).

Proposed program for CoP evaluation meeting, 31/08/11, ITM Antwerp.

PART 1

• Introduction (Bruno Meessen, ITM)
• A framework to evaluate performance of CoPs in international health (Maria Bertone, ITM)
• Discussion

LUNCH

PART 2 (in two groups)

• HHA CoPs: moving towards instruments and indicators for facilitators and members to self-evaluate performance of their CoP
• FEMhealth: moving towards a research protocol to measure the effectiveness of the CoP Financial Access (Isabelle Lange, LSHTM)

 Participation to this event is on invitation only.