The Champlain Local Health Integration Network has received $11.1 million in annual funding to be allocated to community-based health centres across the region to improve care for seniors and people with mental health problems and addictions.
The new funding is welcome news for the Centretown Community Health Centre because it reflects recent appeals to expand community health-care services.
The funding will help shape the system into one focused on what people need as part of the provincial government’s goal to strengthen community health-care centres, says Champlain Network CEO Chantale LeClerc.
“It’s really a movement in the right direction,” she says of the network’s intention to strengthen community health care.
“Not everybody provides the services that people we’re targeting need,” she says. “We’ve tried to target the areas of greatest need."
With a significantly high population of seniors living on their own, Centretown needs a good support system, says Centretown Community Health Centre executive director Simone Thibault.
“When the first dollars came out from the Local Health Integration Network three years ago to support seniors, they pilot tested here,” she says. At that time, the centre received $156,000 from the network to hire a nurse and health worker team to support seniors living alone.
But it’s not enough to address the growing needs of an aging demographic and it won’t be enough according to the Champlain Network’s report. It estimates the number of seniors living in Ontario will double in the next 20 years.
“Already we’re booked up,” Thibault says. “We could use another team.”