St. Joseph Health Centre:Annual Report

Working together. Delivering exceptional service.

Collaboration is crucial to providing high quality care and, at St. Joseph’s Health Centre, it is the foundation of how we work together. For us, collaboration means working with community agencies to deliver direct care to patients and their families, improving the ability of our healthcare teams to work together to deliver exceptional service and teaming up with agencies to improve business processes that help us use our resources more wisely.

Engaging with our Communities

Collaborating with our community partners to enhance the health of the communities we serve is critical to our success. The staff in Community Engagement & Urban Health (CE&UH) help to facilitate partnerships and linkages between our programs and service areas and community agencies and groups with a goal of improving service. CE&UH works with groups and communities as well as LHIN partners to develop creative solutions to improve the health of the diverse communities that we serve. CE&UH seeks to create partnerships, build coalitions, mobilize resources and leverage the unique abilities of local community agencies.

CE&UH provides ongoing support for St. Joe’s Population Panels. Our Panels help us to collect input from our communities to guide planning for innovative programs and services. The Mental Health & Addictions Population Panel, Seniors’ Population Panel and Women’s Population Panel work with the Health Centre to design programs that will best meet the future healthcare needs of the community. Each of our panels has a diverse membership that includes service users, family members, community healthcare providers and staff from St. Joe’s.

Interprofessional Collaboration

St. Joe’s is working hard to break down the boundaries between disciplines. We empower our health professionals to take on more responsibility and work together as a team. In that spirit, point-of-care teams at St. Joseph’s have been taking part in Interprofessional Practice workshops, where they are encouraged to use their own experiences and diversity to solve problems together. This strategy has the direct result of a more efficient and improved patient experience and is in line with our philosophy of valuing patients above all else.

Collaborating with our Partners:

Healthy Child Screening

Early identification of health concerns in children is important so they can receive the appropriate level of care and treatment quickly. CE&UH helped to support the development of the Healthy Child Screening Initiative. It is a partnership between St. Joe’s and Early Years II, Four Villages Community Health Centre, Parkdale Beach Child Care Centre, Parkdale Community Health

Centre, Queen Victoria Public School (Toronto District School Board), St. Christopher House, The Child Development Institute, Toronto Public Health, and a community Ophthalmologist. The program provides screening services that includes dental,

hearing and speech, nutrition, social

and emotional development, physical health and vision. The service is provided at local community schools and has reached children in isolated and marginalized communities who otherwise would face barriers to accessing health care due to fear, lack of knowledge and/or difficulty navigating the healthcare system.

A Soft Landing for Seniors

Safe and timely discharge is important for all our patients, but is particularly important for seniors who live alone and are returning home from the hospital. St. Joe’s is working with a number of community support agencies to ensure there are home services in place at the time of discharge. Soft Landing provides a personal support worker who arranges escorted transportation home, helps with food shopping and meal preparation, medication pick-up and other activities of daily living. This innovative service is a collaboration between St. Joe’s and West Toronto Support Services, St. Clair West Services for Seniors, St. Christopher House and Storefront Humber.