Community Is Central

Community is central to St. Joseph’s Mission – a community teaching hospital, working in partnership with our communities, committed to fostering a healthy community for all.

Being an exemplary community hospital means that St. Joseph’s is a vital community member, Enhancing the Health of the Communities we Serve. We achieve this strategic focus through our clinical programs and services, but we also do it by being a leader in engaging the community in all of our activities.

An International Consensus, A Provincial Imperative

St. Joseph's Health Centre’s (SJHC) commitment to community engagement is reflected in a growing international consensus regarding the valuable contributions that community engagement makes to improving quality health care, and ultimately, achieving good health outcomes.

Closer to home, the Act establishing Ontario’s Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) states that “each health service provider shall engage the community of diverse persons and entities in the area where it provides health services when developing plans and setting priorities for the delivery of health services”. This stems from the belief that a community's health needs and priorities are best determined by the community itself. The importance of community engagement is officially recognized as well in our accreditation process: working with community partners to assess the community’s health needs and actively engaging those partners to set priorities are two primary principles in Accreditation Canada’s Standards for a Proactive and Supportive Organization.

Defining Community Engagement

Community engagement is a process of working collaboratively with people and organizations in our community who are affiliated with us by geographic proximity, special interests, or other shared issues. It often involves partnerships and coalitions that help mobilize resources and influence systems, that change relationships among partners, and that serve as catalysts for developing and/or changing policies, programs, and practices.

Community engagement can thus occur at any level and location in the organization, as well as being initiated by outside stakeholder groups. At St. Joseph's Health Centre it is the Community Engagement and Urban Health (CE&UH) Department that has the specific privilege of seeking opportunities and developing relationships through which our communities can be engaged in the activities of the Health Centre and vice versa.

CE&UH in Action

CE&UH has categorized the various approaches by which St. Joseph’s engages its communities under four broad themes: Raising Community Voices; Cultivating Integration Initiatives; Sharing Reciprocal Capacity; and Facilitating Healthy Exchange. The following are just a few examples of our activities in each of these areas.

Raising Community Voices

Essential to Raising Community Voices are the Population Panels that have been created at the Health Centre to serve as a forum for engaging members of the communities we serve. The panels include patients, family and friends of service users, and community health care providers, in addition to staff from St. Joseph’s.

Currently St. Joseph's Health Centre has three active Population Panels:

• Mental Health & Addictions Population Panel under the leadership of Dan Land and Dr. Jose Silveira as part of the SJHC Mental Health & Addictions Program;
• Seniors’ Population Panel under the leadership of Catherine Cotton and Dr. Andrew Baker as part of SJHC Medicine, Ambulatory & Seniors’ Health Program;
• Women’s Population Panel as the newest established Panel under the leadership of Trish Crawford and Dr. Nick Leyland as part of the Women’s, Children’s & Family Health Program

A fourth Panel, the Newcomer Population Panel, will be set up in the near future under the Emergency, Critical Care & Access Services Program.

CE&UH provides administrative support and “best practice” guidance to the Panels, while the leadership from the SJHC programs plays a vital role for incorporating the Population Panel voices into program planning, service delivery, policies, procedures and evaluation where applicable and appropriate.

We raise community voices also by collecting information about the community, both through quantitative health and demographic data as well as qualitative information. CE&UH contributed these types of information to St. Joseph’s recent round of strategic planning, collecting market share, census, and focus group data to provide a profile of St. Joseph’s catchment area and insight into our communities’ needs and priorities. A priority for our Department this year is to build on this activity to spell out a comprehensive community information and assessment strategy.

In January 2008, Interpreter Services became a member of the CE&UH Department, a welcome development that will allow us to raise and respond to community voices in their own language. While we will continue to provide clinical interpreter services, we will be investigating ways in which appreciation of our patients’, families’, and communities’ language needs can foster a broader appreciation of cultural sensitivity in the provision of high quality care and services.

Cultivating Integration Initiatives

Service integration is at the forefront of the LHINs and is anticipated to be a critical element in the upcoming release of the provincial government’s health strategic plan. With this in mind, the CE&UH has made a concerted effort to be linked with and partner in leading integration bodies and networks.

One such network is the West End Urban Health Alliance (WEUHA). WEUHA is a voluntary collaboration of twenty-seven local health organizations from across the continuum of care. Co-chairing the WEUHA is just one means by which St. Joseph’s works together with other health organizations to improve the health of people living in southwest Toronto.

Our other integration initiatives help specific groups of patients, such as non-insured mothers-to-be, to overcome barriers access to care. Working in partnership with our Finance Department and our local Community Health Centres (CHCs), St. Joseph’s has developed an exemplary agreement with Community Health Centres to share referrals and services for mothers-to-be and their infants, resulting in care for this vulnerable group that they would otherwise be hard-pressed to afford. CE&UH has played a facilitative role in negotiating and maintaining this agreement and has pursued an initiative through the Hospital Collaborative on Marginalized Populations to coordinate policies and practices regarding non-insured clients across Toronto hospitals.

CE&UH works with external peers in coalitions such as the Health Equity Council (HEC) to address system access issues for our vulnerable and disadvantaged populations. This work is part of the department’s initiative to collaborate with internal and external stakeholders in Health Equity planning, as expected by the Toronto Central LHIN.

Sharing Reciprocal Capacity

The Health Centre has remarkable resources that can support community partners in their own capacity building. CE&UH has brokered arrangements between community groups such as Parkdale Alcoholics Anonymous and the Redwood Shelter to use space here at St. Joseph’s at no charge, simple contributions that can make the difference between stability and struggle for grass-roots community organizations.

Facilitating Healthy Exchange

CE&UH contributes to the culture of inquiry and innovation at St. Joseph’s in a variety of ways, but the major knowledge exchange event for 2008 was our day-conference, co-sponsored with the Ontario Hospital Health Promotion Network, “Working Together to Prevent and Manage Chronic Disease: Ideas, Innovation, and Insight”. Appealing to people and agencies from across health and social service sectors, the conference exemplifies CE&UH’s commitment on behalf of St. Joseph’s to respond to community health care needs by working in collaboration with diverse community partners.

Our Goals

The overarching goal of CE&UH is to support the Vision, Mission, and Values of St. Joseph’s Health Centre. Our underlying goal is to foster community engagement and awareness across the organization in order to enhance the health of the patients, families, and communities we serve. To these ends, we bring an urban community perspective to the Health Centre’s planning, policies and programs, promote reflection and analysis regarding St. Joseph’s community engagement and collaboration practices, but also reach out and bring a hospital perspective to community partners: we believe engagement is a two-way process.

The CE&UH Department will be happy to help in whatever engagement initiatives you want to consider.

Contact Us

For more information about Community Engagement and Urban Health or to talk with us about making community connections, obtaining community data or investigating possible community projects please call us at 416-530-6000 ext. 3596.

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Page last updated: February 04, 2010