Patient and caregiver engagement within healthcare institutions is increasingly recognised for its relevance to clinical care, education and research. Published work often describes engagement in specific contexts, but literature on institution-wide models that centralise practices across domains is limited. At SickKids, engagement efforts had historically been fragmented and inconsistent, which constrained the potential for meaningful, sustained partnerships and cross-domain learning. To address these limitations, SickKids developed a coordinated model to integrate the voices of patients, families and communities across the organisation.
The SickKids Model of advisor-centred engagement was developed through review of existing frameworks and extensive stakeholder consultations. The model's launch included creation of a central Office of Patient, Family and Community Engagement to lead institution-wide adoption. This centralised office was established to coordinate engagement practices, streamline processes and provide a consistent structure for advisors and staff to work together across clinical care, education and research.
The model emphasises four strategic priorities: advisor-centredness, efficiency, sustainability and scalability. These priorities guide how the institution engages advisors and how engagement activities are organised and supported. Central resources were put in place to address practical barriers that had contributed to siloed practices, including standardised onboarding, procedures for honouraria and consolidated engagement processes intended to reduce duplication and variability across departments.
A prominent core element is the Engagement Incubator, conceived as a dedicated space for training, knowledge exchange and capacity development. The Incubator aims to build skills and share best practices among staff and advisors, fostering methodological improvements in patient-oriented research and enhancing the quality of engagement across domains. It functions alongside the central office resources to create consistent supports for sustainable advisor participation.
During its first year of operation, the Office supported numerous engagement activities across clinical care, education and research. It developed inclusive policies to standardise engagement practices and offered training both to staff and to advisors. Centralised supports were used to streamline advisor onboarding and manage honourarium processes. These activities sought to reduce fragmentation of effort and to strengthen institutional capacity for meaningful engagement.
Metrics to assess the model’s implementation and impact are being developed rather than fully established. Planned measures include assessment of engagement reach, participant satisfaction, capacity building outcomes and the Office’s methodological contributions to patient-oriented research practice. The source notes that these measures are part of ongoing work to evaluate both operational success and the research and educational impacts of integrated engagement.
Early learnings from implementation highlight several enablers for embedding engagement at a systemic level. Notable among these are strong institutional commitment, allocation of dedicated resources and active cross-departmental collaboration. These elements are presented as critical to moving engagement beyond isolated projects to sustained, organisation-wide practice.
The model faces challenges that remain to be addressed. Demand for engagement support is increasing, which creates pressure on central resources and requires careful prioritisation. The development of rigorous, robust evaluation metrics is ongoing; the source indicates that creating suitable measures to capture impact across domains remains a limitation of early implementation. No additional operational details or quantitative outcomes were reported in the source.
The SickKids Model of Advisor-Centred Engagement represents an effort to institutionalise engagement by creating a centralised infrastructure that supports cross-domain learning, reduces fragmentation and strengthens organisational capacity. Initial implementation suggests that a coordinated, scalable and sustainable approach can better integrate lived experience into clinical care, education and research. The model is presented as a potential blueprint for other healthcare organisations seeking to embed engagement practices at the institutional level, while acknowledging that evaluation and resource challenges persist.