The Sarnia-Lambton Ontario Health Team (SL-OHT) has one main goal - to improve the healthcare journey for members of the community.
It’s no easy feat. There are over 40 partners that they are working to bring together in what they call a one door approach.
“So that's across the health and social service sector. What we really are doing is working together to look at how we provide care,” says SL-OHT executive director Nadine Neve.
“We want you to go to one door and it's never the wrong door. We've got a lot of work going on around navigation and kind of that no-wrong-door approach where individuals could access any different provider and they would know where is the best place for them to get the type of care that they're asking for, if it's not at their own organization. So it's really kind of streamlining programs and services to meet the needs of individuals.”
In a nutshell, you could go to one organization for care, and if they couldn’t provide it, they would know the right one that could.
“That's the goal that we're striving towards. I think it's a really interesting way to look at healthcare. We know there's a lot of human resource challenges and just challenges with aging populations in our community. We do have a lot of seniors and just making sure that our systems and our services are easy for them to access.”
The Age Friendly Sarnia Lambton is just one of the sites people can access that the SL-OHT has worked on.
“One of the key mandates for OHTs is really to have co-designed programs, so what that means is we actually engage patients, families, care partners in the planning and design of services,” explains Neve.
“We're taking lived experience and understanding what will work for them, so that age-friendly Sarnia-Lambton website, we did a refresh of that in 2022, and that was really through multiple focus groups and heavily co-designed with patients, families, and care partners.”
The SL-OHT site is also a good resource in finding services, employment opportunities in the healthcare industry, and mental health resources.
Providing equitable services for everyone is what’s next for the SL-OHT.
“It could be access for individuals to receive care in the language that is their native tongue. It could be individuals that are homeless or precariously housed. It could be individuals from any of the Indigenous communities in Sarnia-Lambton,” explains Neve.
You would think that having to coordinate so many organizations and services would provide a challenge, but Neve and her team take it all in stride.
“Honestly, we do that really well in Sarnia-Lambton. I think we learned really well from COVID, and we've just really continued to build on that. I think we're very fortunate to live where we do and to have the kind of collaboration and partnerships that we have in Sarnia-Lambton,” says Neve.