Canadian Health Services and Policy Research Alliance (CHSPRA)

The Canadian Health Services and Policy Alliance (CHSPRA) brings together organizations and from across the health system community to collaborate on specific and common priority initiatives. Stemming from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research – Institute of Health Services and Policy Research’s (CIHR – IHSPR) IHSPR Pan Canadian Vision and Strategy (Executive Summary | Full Report), the Alliance has successfully developed a number of health system enabling assets that have served our collective community over the past several years.

Using a voluntary workgroup structure, the Alliance provides leadership and the enabling infrastructure to build a shared workgroup outcome, project plan, and support the development of the planned products to support the broader constituencies. The Training Modernization working group gave rise to the development of alternate career paths for HSPR PhD students and the establishment of the successful Impact Fellowship program. The Impact Assessment working group has successfully extended the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences impact framework to begin to articulate the value of HSPR research to the health system beyond a transactional traditional bibliometric approach.

Through its focused “shared objective and outcome” based approach, the Alliance has demonstrated the value of a pan-Canadian forum for output and outcome-based collaboration. By providing the leadership and the necessary discipline and infrastructure, CHSPRA aspires to support the development of the enablers needed to translate science into practice.