Honourable Mention: Public Health French Language Services Community of Practice

The question of compliance with the French Language Services Act or of the respect to the Francophone population by public health units is a big source of frustration for the Commissioner’s Office. But when there’s good news, it is certainly worth talking.

Ottawa Public Health (OPH) and the Eastern Ontario health Unit (EOHU) received one-time funding from the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care for the period of August 2012 to March 2013 to develop a Public Health French Language Services Community of Practice (PH FLS CoP) to provide a central resource for Ontario’s 36 public health units. This central resource would help support the local planning, delivery and evaluation of French-language programs and services.

The specific objectives of this Community of Practice are to increase awareness of and access to existing French-language services tools and resources, and to reduce the duplication of efforts across public health units, which would make the collective effort to deliver French-language services more efficient.

In addition, by consolidating their resources, the public health units can collaborate and provide more consistent French-language services across the province. The intention is also to collaborate on problem-solving, sharing best practices, and increasing the pace of development for these services, which can benefit both the service providers and the recipients of these services, namely Franco-Ontarians. Congrats for this great initiative!

The Honourable Mentions Series is a series of 15 blog posts that the Commissioner is releasing to individually highlight initiatives by government ministries and agencies that demonstrate efforts to expand the delivery of high-quality French-language services, as listed in his 2012-2013 Annual Report. The full list of honourable mentions and the relevant blog posts are available here.