Exploring a "community of practice" methodology as a regional platform for large-scale collaboration in cancer surgery-the Ottawa approach.

Pressing challenges have forced health care providers to rethink traditional silos and professional boundaries. Communities of practice (cops) have been identified as a means to share knowledge across silos and boundaries. However, clarity sufficient to enable their easy and uniform reproducibility is lacking, leading to a gap between cop conceptualization and implementation. This paper explores a cop structure and outlines a framework that is adaptable, measurable, and implementable across health disciplines in a regional cancer surgery program.