Intentional Development of Communities Of Practice– Improving Knowledge Sharing And Work Guidelines

Healthcare professionals within operations widely use guidelines for sharing knowledge however, guideline effectiveness varies. Communities of practice (CoP) can increase guideline compliance and best practice transfer, however, only few studies focus on intentional CoP development that support guideline effectiveness. We address this gap by proposing and testing a framework for intentional CoP development within operations to study the relationship between organizational knowledge sharing and CoP. A framework for intentional CoP development is synthesised from CoP research. The test setting is a blood analysis unit in a regional hospital where employees apply automatic analysis equipment. Two CoPs are developed and the study finds that manager support, voluntarism and undisturbed meeting space are important elements for CoP development.