Honourable Mention: Building Health Service Providers’ Capacity to Deliver French-Language Services
Throughout the past year, the Toronto Central Local Health Integration Network (TC LHIN) has focused on increasing awareness amongst its health service providers about the shared responsibility to deliver health services in French. To help them comply with the French Language Services Act, the Toronto Central LHIN initiated a capacity survey last year which required each health service provider ─ including those that are non-designated ─ to conduct a self-evaluation of its capacity to deliver French-language services. The objective of this survey was to identify gaps in these services, and to outline areas where assistance was needed from the LHIN to implement adequate French-language services.
The Toronto Central LHIN is working with agencies to build their collective capacity to deliver French-language services through collaboration, shared knowledge and resources. This is part of the French-language services strategy that the Toronto Central LHIN has adopted, which includes mandates to provide Francophones with access to French-language services across the full range of health services, create formal and informal partnerships among French-language services providers to optimize the use of scare resources, and work with French Language Health Planning Entities to build awareness of the active offer of French-language services. These are just some of the mandates that constitute the Toronto Central LHIN’s strategy to improve the active offer of services for the Francophone clientele, and I believe this strategy will prove to be an effective method to achieve several targets.
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.