Highlighting some of SOHT’s Priority Projects for 2023-2024

As the new fiscal year gets underway for many of our partner organizations, we know there is a lot of great work happening across Scarborough to support the health and wellness of our community members. In line with SOHT’s Strategic Plan and Ontario Health (OH)’s Objectives for Ontario Health Teams (OHTs), we wanted to share a few of the priority projects SOHT will be working on for the coming year together with all of you

Toronto Navigation Project

Together with 7 other Toronto-area OHTs, SOHT is building a service directory to help people find health and social services across Toronto. This initiative is part of SOHT’s Driving System Integration strategy and is connected to a key priority from OH for OHTs to provide 24/7 navigation services for community members to help everyone access the care they need. The new directory, Toronto Health and Social Services Directory: Your Guide to Finding Care Close to Home, will launch in late April and will draw search results from Healthline, 211 Ontario and Connex Ontario to provide one complementary service directory that combines the results of these 3 services. 

Geomapping Tool

SOHT is developing a geomapping tool as another key element of our Driving System Integration strategy. This tool will help support the OHT mandate to gather data regarding population health management and local indicators to guide our strategies and initiatives going forward. We are currently in the process of procuring software to support this priority and then will be working with partners to populate our repository with granular data to further guide our work.

Community Engagement Framework Implementation

A key principle of our work is connecting and co-designing care with clients, families and our community. To guide this work, a key aspect of our #ScarboroughStrong strategy is the development and implementation of a Community Engagement Framework. We are pleased to share that SOHT’s Community Engagement working group has now completed development of our framework which will help ensure we have a consistent and coordinated approach to community engagement across all SOHT projects. All SOHT Committees are expected to develop a community engagement strategy in alignment with the framework which will be assessed by our working group to ensure our community engagement is both meaningful and effective. You can access the SOHT Community Engagement Framework here: [I think it would be ideal if we had this housed on a page on our website – maybe we can discuss what makes sense here or for now perhaps there is a document on the Sharepoint site we could link to or something?]

Supporting Primary Care Priority Initiatives

Supporting the expanded use of primary care tools across Scarborough in collaboration with the Scarborough Family Physicians’ Network (SFPN) is another important area of focus for SOHT within our strategic pillar of Driving System Integration, and is a priority for Ontario Health as well.  Two of these priorities are SCOPE – Seamless Care Optimizing Patient Experience, which helps primary care providers navigate a wide range of hospital and community services and resources. In Scarborough, SCOPE has been implemented through a partnership with Scarborough Health Network (SHN) and Scarborough Centre for Healthy Communities (SCHC) involving an interprofessional team of experts and specialists. Another primary care priority is OCEAN e-Referral, which allows primary care providers to send referrals and receive updates quickly through an Electronic Medical Record. We know from providers who use these services how beneficial they can be for the practice and for supporting more patients, but uptake across Scarborough primary care providers is lower than the OHT average. Our goal is to support more family physicians across Scarborough to adopt and implement these useful tools together with SFPN.

Provider Experience Project

As a part of SOHT’s quadruple aim philosophy, we are creating an interactive dashboard to provide real time insights into the experiences of our providers across SOHT. This will help us to better understand the experiences of providers across the sector within our community so we can address inequalities in provider experience which ultimately will also support improved care for clients and families across Scarborough.

We will provide updates throughout the year on these and other projects. If you would like further information on any of these initiatives, please reach out to Tiffany Wu at twu1@shn.ca.