[Organizational learning and health promotion: a Quebec project]

This article focuses on health promotion laboratories, a Quebec professional development program offered by the Public Health Department of the Montréal Region to teams of professionals and managers working in health promotion within local public health organizations. The objective is to examine the process of translating the knowledge gained by participants as a result of the program over the longer term within the organization.

This was a qualitative descriptive study. The work was guided by Nonaka’s Organizational Knowledge Creation Model. Data were collected from participants at several types of discussion and development events held in the three months following the end of the pilot project. A thematic content analysis was performed using a grid derived from Nonaka’s model.

The analysis revealed the presence of both externalization and internalization in two of the sites, as well as a considerable volume of combinations in the four sites studied. In the latter case, the learnings reused over the longer term were similar to those that had been transferred in the short term (e.g. ideas and methods relating to partnership, planning, etc.).

These results are important, in that they confirm the laboratories’ potential to propagate the learnings throughout the organization, beyond the short-term gains made by participants during the laboratories. These learnings could potentially pave the way for new practices.