Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement

CFHI was founded in 1996 with an endowment from the Canadian federal government. Originally called the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (CHSRF), the organization was created to support evidence-informed decision-making, management and delivery of health services through funding research, capacity building and knowledge. Programs such as Executive Training for Research Application (EXTRA) were developed and, over time, the Foundation began to evolve from an emphasis on building applied health services research to supporting the adoption of innovative practices across Canadian healthcare systems.

New strategic priorities were established in 2009, a new vision and mission took effect in 2011, and new goals were set in 2012. That same year, the Foundation changed its name to the Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement (CFHI) to better reflect its evolution to an organization focused on the identification, spread and scale of proven healthcare innovations.

The current President of CFHI is Jennifer Zelmer,[2] who has been in the position since 2019; Dr. Lynn Stevenson,[3] Former Associate Deputy Minister of Health in the B.C. Ministry of Health, is the Chair of the Board of Directors.

CFHI collaborates closely with Health Canada and many provincial and territorial health authorities across the country. They also support the improvement efforts of large regional agencies, such as hospitals, clinics, and community care facilities in neighbourhoods throughout Canada to accelerate healthcare improvement.

CFHI is guided by the perspectives of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples in sharing learning and enhancing relationships that support cultural safety and humility.

Evaluation and performance management is also embedded into all collaborations as part of the CFHI mandate to make sure all programs are efficient, responsive and productive.[4]

CFHI is guided by four streams of work:

CFHI is recognized as a leader in patient, family and caregiver engagement. Since 2010, CFHI has led collaboratives and championed partnerships with patients and families to improve quality across the continuum of care. The organization's journey in patient, family and caregiver engagement began with the Patient Engagement Projects (PEP) initiative. In 2010 and 2011, PEP supported 17 projects across Canada that were led by healthcare providers who engaged patients to improve service design and delivery. These projects led to improvements in access, patient safety, efficiency and other quality-related domains.

The PEP initiative evolved to become the Partnering with Patients and Families Collaborative. In 2014 and 2015, this collaborative provided education, coaching, funding and other support to 22 teams to partner in meaningful ways with patients and families on quality improvement initiatives.

Continuing to build on its work, in 2015 CFHI launched the Better Together Campaign,[14] in partnership with the Institute for Patient and Family-Centered Care in the United States and leading healthcare organizations across Canada. Throughout the campaign, organizations delivering healthcare were supported to adapt and implement improvements in family presence policies. In 2016, CFHI launched an e-collaborative (Better Together: Partnering with Families) to support 12 teams to adopt and implement these new policies. By 2017 more than 50 organizations from across Canada publicly pledged to review and improve their family presence policies. Since then CFHI has held Policy Roundtables and continued to engage and work with those involved.

In 2018, CFHI launched the Bridge-to-Home[15] spread collaborative to focus to on care transitions from the perspective of patients and caregivers. Together with patient, family, and caregiver partners, teams implemented a patient-oriented care transitions bundle to ensure patients and caregivers had the knowledge and understanding they needed to improve their experience and confidence to transition well from hospital back to home or the community.

Through learning from all this work, the patient, family and caregiver engagement and partnerships portfolio has grown and expanded across all CFHI programming. [16]

• An Innovative Strategy in Organizational Transformation: Creating and Implementing a Transition Support Office Within a University Health Centre[17]
• Knowledge in Action: Healthcare Management and Governance Innovation Lab[18]
• Accelerating Healthcare Improvement in Canada: A Review of Policy Options to Sustain, Improve and Transform Healthcare[19]
• Funding Health and Social Care in Montréal, Québec: A Review of the Methods and the Potential Role of Incentives[20]
• Reviewing the Potential Roles of Financial Incentives for Funding Healthcare in Canada[21]
• Strengthening Primary Health Care Through Primary Care and Public Collaboration[22]
• A Comparative Study of Three Transformative Healthcare Systems: Lessons for Canada[23]
• On-going Mythbusters series challenging widely held beliefs about the Canadian healthcare system with current evidence, translated into multiple languages[24]

• Canadian Patient Safety Institute
• Canadian Nurses Association
• Canadian Medical Association
• Canadian College of Health Leaders
• Northwest Health and Social Services
• Northshore Tribal Council
• EvidenceNetwork.ca
• Initiative sur le partage des connaissances et le développement des compétences
• Capital Health
• Institut national de santé publique du Québec

• Canadian Partnership Against Cancer
• Commonwealth Fund
• Health Canada
• Canadian Feed the Children