Residents of Fort Frances will be seeing a paper survey for the Rainy River District Ontario Health Team (RRDOHT)’s Health Care Matters campaign, with a slate of open houses to be held across the district next week in order to let more people weigh in with their thoughts.
The Healthcare Matters campaign is a public engagement campaign that is taking a look at what is working well, what isn’t working, where people are struggling and what needs to change in the local healthcare system. According to RRDOHT communications lead Amanda Roy, the campaign wants to hear as much as possible from District residents to help inform the future of healthcare in the region.
“We’re looking to learn everything we possibly can about the challenges and experiences that residents of the Rainy River District face in accessing their healthcare, and in their healthcare journey,” Roy said.
“It’s not just about access; it’s about all aspects of healthcare, like the whole picture.”
The campaign kicked off in September, and paper surveys have begun to hit households in Fort Frances, offering residents a chance to have their opinions on local healthcare, its successes and struggles, heard. Roy said the survey was the launch of the public-facing component of the strategic engagement and is the result of many focus groups held to determine what the survey would look like and be looking for.
“We engaged all leadership from all of our primary healthcare organizations in the Rainy River District,” Roy said.
“We’ve engaged the physicians, district physicians, so physicians from across the district: EMO, Atikokan, Fort Frances and Rainy River. There’s been a lot of work leading into this, and our patient family advisory committee for the OHT has representatives from across the District from each of the main communities, and they were instrumental in helping determine some of the questions, along with our leadership council.”
The survey, also available online until Nov. 20, is asking people for their thoughts on access to care, travel, navigating the health system, quality and coordination of care, primary care, home care, mental health and addictions and the services and supports residents need. To this point, Roy said roughly 300 people have taken the online survey.
The RRDOHT is also holding a series of open house events across the district beginning next week to allow for more people to be involved in the process. There’s no requirement to have done the survey to attend the open house, but likewise there’s nothing preventing those who have done the survey from also attending their local open house event. Roy said the goal is not to duplicate information between the two formats of public engagement but is instead to promote conversations and discussion about healthcare in the region.
“The point of the town halls is to foster conversations amongst residents, to be able to get into a little bit more detail of what these experiences are, to hear about the process and more detail about the process and what they can expect for the future, and to just dive into some more in-depth questions with the people that want to come out,” Roy said.
“The goal of [the engagement] is to hear about the experiences and assess the needs for change, the things that are working well, but maybe could be more connected, identifying gaps, all of those things. And sometimes also, like we notice in healthcare a lot, that there’s also a major gap. One of the things that the OHT, and when I say OHT, I mean all of the healthcare partners in the Rainy River District, identified is that, several years ago, a huge barrier was just getting any transportation in the district to get to appointments, whether that’s locally or regionally, so that’s whether you may or may not know this, and the public may or may not know it. There are more transportation options across the District now, moreso than ever before.”
The town halls will be held in:
• Atikokan: Oct. 20 at the Atikokan Legion, 115 O’Brien St., 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.
• Fort Frances: Oct. 21 at the Memorial Sports Centre Auditorium, 740 Scott St., while those with accessibility requirements can attend the Shaw Room of the Fort Frances Public Library Technology Centre, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
• Emo: Oct. 22 at the Emo Inn, 5916 Hwy. 11/71, 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.
• Rainy River: Rainy River Rec Centre Hall, 219 Government Rd. At Broadway Ave., 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
“We really just want to encourage residents to come out,” Roy said.
“If they can’t come for the whole time, it’s still worth their time to come for even an hour, or come by and put their name down on a list and fill out and do some of the booths that aren’t happening during the facilitated part of the town hall, so they can kind of come and drop in. Again, it is an open town hall, so it’s hard to gauge what the numbers will be, but we tried to go with venues that were kind of like centrally located, where people go often, kind of thing, and that have some more capacity than usual.”
