In January, HealthCareCAN and its professional development division, CHA Learning, launched our new strategic plan for 2024-2029. The plan outlines our organization’s key objectives in four pillars:
- Champion the Canadian Health Research Ecosystem
- Advocate for a Sustainable and Equitable Health System
- Empower Leadership and Professional Development
- Unite, Support and Serve Members
You can read the whole plan on the HealthCareCAN website.
All staff worked together in summer of 2023 to discuss the existing organizational values and ultimately, select new ones. Our new values, as outlined in the plan are:
In the summer of 2023, HealthCareCAN and the CHA Learning team came together to reflect on our organizational values and define new ones that better represent our vision. Here are our new values, as outlined in the plan:
Community: we create safe and inclusive spaces and networks for dialogue, debate, advocacy, mutual support and learning.
Collaboration: we engage, listen, design and evolve together by combining strengths and voices to impact change.
Curiosity: we seek to learn and to understand other perspectives and needs to inform and guide our actions, services and products.
Agility: we are nimble and quick in anticipating, responding and adapting.
CHA Learning
CHA Learning, the professional development division of HealthCareCAN, has worked for over 70 years to serve the health system and HealthCareCAN members by delivering world-class, online healthcare education in a highly accessible and relevant way. Our mission remains the same: to empower health professionals with the knowledge, skills and relationships to lead health system improvement.
As part of our own teambuilding and strategic conversations at CHA Learning, we reflected on the organization’s values and how they apply to our division. What do these new values mean in terms of how we serve organizations, partners and our individual learners?
Before addressing that critical question, it was essential for our team to fully understand what organizational values are and why they matter.
First, let’s go over what organizational values are and why they are important.
Organizational values are a set of core beliefs held by an organization and are intended to foster a shared understanding of purpose, actions and behaviours. Values should have a meaningful impact on the organizational culture and should also drive decision-making and strategy, ensuring alignment at all times. Values impact how people are treated internally (employees) as well as how the organization and team members treat stakeholders.
Our team played a key role in selecting the organization’s values, carefully considering their definitions and ensuring they align with CHA Learning’s core purpose and our collective beliefs. To further explore how our team embodies these values, we set out to clearly outline our practices and behaviors.
Our team was actively involved in selecting the values for the organization, but we decided to reflect on the definitions and whether they align with CHA Learning’s core purpose and our beliefs as a team.
Community
CHA Learning has always strived to foster a learning community. By our very mission, we seek to create relationships amongst learners, faculty and system partners. Our programs are learner-centered, giving people knowledge and skills to facilitate improvement in the wider healthcare community, regardless of where they live, and what part of the continuum of care they work in. We seek to break down siloes by connecting those working in provincial health systems in a national community where we promote connectedness, understanding and knowledge-sharing.
Collaboration
We believe we are better when we collaborate with others, rather than going it alone. Healthcare improvement and learning is a team sport – we seek to partner with members and other organizations to leverage each other’s strengths and avoid duplication of effort. We listen to the needs of members and others in the system when we look at developing new programming and bring subject matter experts from all over the system to support the best and most current knowledge translation. We also collaborate with members and other healthcare organizations to understand how we can help with their teams’ learning needs and design custom or adapted programming that meets their unique needs.
Curiosity
Curiosity is at the very core of learning. It really underpins the ability of any person, team or organization to grow and improve. At the heart of our program offerings is a genuine desire to explore, investigate and learn about the gaps and needs within the system and the new and novel ways others are doing things. We value diverse perspectives and learn from one another’s experiences. By spreading evidence-informed, innovative practices and mindsets, we help knowledge and innovation to reach further. Our podcast, The HQ is a good example of our own curiosity that is spreading knowledge across Canada and beyond. We also seek to foster curiosity in our learners by ensuring our programs are applied and practical, giving health professionals the opportunity to grow through meaningful reflection, openness and innovative thinking.
Agility
CHA Learning is a small and mighty team. We pride ourselves on our ability to pivot and flex to effectively respond to the needs of those we serve. We avoid barriers to progress and change, are open to looking at new ways of doing things so we can be effective and efficient in meeting our mission. Every day, challenges and opportunities arise that are met with openness, creativity and careful consideration of our approach to ensure that we balance this agility with ensuring we continue to deliver the high-quality products and services we are known for.
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These values guide the strategic and operational decisions we make as a team – how we prioritize our work and resources, the partnerships we establish, the development and implementation of policies, and so on. But more importantly, these values guide our relationships and our day-to-day interactions with learners, faculty, organizations and partners, and enhance the impact we can have on each individual, team, organization and ultimately, the health system.