Established in 2004 (and known at the time as the Queen’s Joanna Briggs Collaboration – QJBC), QcHcQ was the first North American collaborating centre of the Joanna Briggs Institute. QcHcQ was initially formed as an academic-clinical practice partnership with South Eastern Ontario Health Sciences Centre to promote the use of best available evidence in nursing practice in one Ontario region. What began as a demonstration project supported through a grant from the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care became a regionally developed academic-practice model driven by local practice priorities to improve health care delivery. Further funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health and an active partnership with the Canadian Patient Safety Institute and Accreditation Canada supported work from 2009-2014.

QcHcQ has evolved into an active and productive model focused on knowledge translation. QcHcQ was renamed in 2016 and classified as a JBI Centre of Excellence. To qualify as a JBI Centre of Excellence, a group must meet a comprehensive set of practice standards, make an active contribution as authors and peer reviewers of systematic reviews, advance the science of synthesis, promote scholarship and implementation of best practices. The firm foundation established with practice partners over the preceding years provides a solid basis for a pan-Canadian partnership in the area of patient care quality.

As an emerging leader in integrated knowledge translation, QcHcQ supports knowledge creation, capacity building, knowledge exchange, and policy development.

JBI was founded in 1996 in Australia.  It is the international not-for-profit, research and development arm of the School of Translational Science based within the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. JBI collaborates internationally with over 70 entities across the world. The Institute and its collaborating entities promote and support the synthesis, transfer and utilization of evidence through identifying feasible, appropriate, meaningful and effective healthcare practices to assist in the improvement of healthcare outcomes globally.

JBI is a sister organization to the well-established international Cochrane Collaboration. Cochrane primarily examines and synthesizes quantitative evidence on effectiveness whereas JBI developed a methodological approach to respond to practice questions through rigorous syntheses of both quantitative and qualitative evidence. The QcHcQ interface with both Cochrane and JBI methods is essential and leaders at both the Cochrane and JBI collaborations strongly support this innovative research in advancing methods.