As part of the MHCC, the Knowledge Exchange Centre (KEC) aims to help improve the lives of people living with mental illness by creating ways for Canadians to access information, share knowledge, and exchange ideas about mental health.
The KEC has two major goals:
- To enhance knowledge exchange with regard to critical ideas and practices identified by the MHCC mental health strategy; and
- To enhance capacity for knowledge exchange throughout the Canadian mental health system.
To reach its goals, the KEC works to make sure that knowledge about mental health:
- is accessible to everyone, including people with lived experience of mental health problems, care providers, and policy makers;
- encourages multidirectional conversations;
- incorporates all types of information from different sources;
- can lead to action; and
- integrates activating principles such as participant engagement, interactivity, and facilitation.
The Knowledge Exchange Centre's Activities
There are three themes underlying KEC activities:
Share
The KEC works to ensure that mental health knowledge is shared with everyone through such activities as:
- the release of an interactive publication called Health in Mind,
- an easily searchable collection of tools and information;
- a protocol for identifying units of knowledge in mental health, which includes both (a) critical well-validated knowledge and (b) specific feasible practices which follow from that knowledge.
Collaborate
The KEC is committed to collaborating with leading individuals and organizations to bring experts together to discuss knowledge exchange and exchange information.
To do this effectively, the KEC will:
- establish and foster knowledge exchange networks, including communities of practice and inter-agency alliances; and
- use knowledge management methods to increase the capacity of individuals, teams, and organizations to work together and access knowledge.
Support
The KEC will support individuals and organizations to become more effective at knowledge exchange by:
- promoting toolkits and other educational materials;
- leading workshops to teach the principles of activated knowledge exchange; and
- implementing knowledge activation initiatives which will focus on the evaluation of existing knowledge exchange strategies with the long-term goal of offering knowledge activation initiatives to other mental health organizations in Canada.
To learn more about the online activities MHCC is building to share knowledge, facilitate collaboration and help support knowledge mobilization, please visit here.
This website and activities are in the initial stage of development and may not be complete or fully functional. Please feel free to provide feedback or comments through the 'contact us' link.