New paper published online today at BMC-Health Services Research

Assessment of variation in the Alberta Context Tool: The contribution of unit level contextual factors and practice specialty in Canadian pediatric care settings.

4 October 2011

Authors: Carole A. Estabrooks, Janet Squires, Alison Hutchinson, Shannon Scott, Greta Cummings, SungHyun Kang, William Midodzi, Bonnie Stevens

Background: There are few validated measures of organizational context and none that we located are parsimonious and address modifiable characteristics of context. The Alberta Context Tool (ACT) was developed to meet this need. The instrument assesses 8 dimensions of context, which comprise 10 concepts. The purpose of this paper is to report evidence to further the validity argument for ACT. The specific objectives of this paper are to: (1) examine the extent to which the 10 ACT concepts discriminate between patient care units and (2) identify variables that significantly contribute to between-unit variation for each of the 10 concepts.