INITIATIVES
By acting as a trusted, accountable, and evidence-informed partner, IHSTS helps ensure health innovations deliver measurable, lasting impact across care settings and communities.
Proof through practice
At IHSTS, we believe that evidence in action – real initiatives with measurable effects – is the cornerstone of credible system transformation.
Our initiatives showcase how collaborative, evidence-informed approaches address pressing health challenges in British Columbia, strengthen community capacity, and lay the groundwork for sustainable system impact.
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Below you’ll find highlights of active and completed initiatives, the problems they address, IHSTS’s role, current stage, early indicators of progress, and pathways toward sustainability and scale.
our core initatives
BC Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) Network
System challenge: Type 2 diabetes remains one of the major chronic disease burdens in BC, driving morbidity, healthcare costs, and inequities in access to preventive care.
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IHSTS role: Provincial steward and coordinator. IHSTS supports the T2D Network’s ongoing development, bringing partners together, sharing evidence, and guiding strategy toward prevention, self-management, and reversible care pathways.
Current stage: Active ecosystem-wide initiative with refreshed strategy underway.
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Outcomes: Strengthened cross-sector engagement with active participation from multiple stakeholders; effective marketing of the new digital platform for resource sharing and coordination; expanded access to community resources; and well-attended community screening programs.
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Sustainability & scale pathway: Digital and practice solutions designed for province-wide use; ongoing growth through partnerships, community initiatives, focus on at risk rural populations, and shared learnings across regions.
BC Centre for Palliative Care
System challenge: In BC, people living with serious illness experience inconsistent access to early and integrated palliative care. Gaps in tools, education, standards, and measurements across care settings and regions make access to coordinated, person-centred care challenging. This often leads to poorer patient outcomes, added stress for families, and avoidable hospital use.
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IHSTS role: IHSTS provides governance oversight and operational support to the BC Centre for Palliative Care (BCCPC), a provincial organization that has delivered measurable impact across the health system and communities for over a decade. Guided by research and lived experiences, BCCPC is a trusted, evidence-informed partner that enhances access to high-quality palliative approach to care across the serious illness journey through the co-development of innovative solutions, essential resources, and standardized education. ​
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Current stage: Implementation and spread with an equity lens. Several province-wide initiatives are underway, focusing on underserved populations and community care settings, including home, long-term care, and assisted living, and on linking these settings with compassionate communities' initiatives.
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Outcomes: Thousands of healthcare providers are trained in culturally safe advance care planning and palliative care integration, while hundreds of Compassionate Community initiatives and tens of thousands of public participants are supported with essential resources, education, and local programs.
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Sustainability & scale pathway: BCCPC’s work is scaled and sustained through meaningful engagement and collaboration with extensive provincial networks, including health authorities, providers, educators, community organizations, researchers, and people with lived experience. Alignment with provincial and national priorities, coupled with a growing evidence base that builds capacity and informs continuous improvement, supports broader adoption of BCCPC’s work across BC and beyond.
project initatives
Institute for Personalized Therapeutic Nutrition Alliance
System challenge: Traditional chronic disease care often under-emphasises dietary intervention, despite evidence for nutritional approaches to conditions like type 2 diabetes.
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IHSTS role: Strategic alliance and knowledge translation partner, helping translate research into practice and policy.
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Current stage: Active collaboration to expand therapeutic nutrition training and care models.
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Outcomes: Strengthened training pathways for primary care clinicians; evidence advancement for food-first clinical approaches.
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Sustainability & scale pathway: Integration with primary care models and health professional education; evidence informing practice norms.
South Asian Physician, Women, and Youth Type 2 Diabetes Round Table
System challenge: South Asian populations face elevated risk of type 2 diabetes, influenced by cultural, social, and lifestyle factors.
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IHSTS role: Facilitator and co-designer of community engagement sessions, enabling lived experience insights to inform culturally tailored strategies.​
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Current stage: Completed engagement event with documentation of insights.
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Outcomes: Generation of actionable insights for tailoring diabetes care strategies and culturally responsive prevention approaches.
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Sustainability & scale pathway: Informing future culturally tailored interventions and integrating learnings into larger T2D initiatives.
Rural Chronic Disease & Strengthening Primary Care
System challenge: Rural and remote communities often lack access to culturally safe, team-based chronic disease care.
IHSTS role: Co-designer and implementation partner, supporting community-led design processes.​
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Current stage: Active co-design and early implementation phase.
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Outcomes: Community-led toolkits, improved access to HbA1C testing, expanded clinician engagement, culturally safe approaches to remission support.
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Sustainability & scale pathway: Use of community toolkits and learnings to inform rural chronic disease services more broadly; resource models for replication.
Impact at a Glance
IHSTS connects and accelerates system innovation through cross-sector partnerships and evidence-informed implementation.
Across projects, early signals of progress include:
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Expanding engagement of clinicians and community partners in preventive care and chronic disease management.
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Creation of collaborative networks focused on scalable solutions to persistent health challenges.
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Culturally tailored insights guiding strategy and service design.
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Growing digital and community-based supports for self-management.
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As data evolves, IHSTS uses performance dashboards to track engagement, output, and system change impact across its key initiatives.
Our partners
