Every year in May, Children’s Mental Health Ontario (CMHO) celebrates Children’s Mental Health Week. This year’s theme is Voices Unheard, Stories Told: Centering the Diversity of Ontario’s Infants, Children & Youth, recognizing that many children, youth and families continue to face disproportionate barriers to mental health care. CMHO is highlighting these equity gaps in mental health access and naming the urgent need for culturally safe and community-based mental health services.
At GH-CCMH, we are on the cusp of developing a new strategic plan, Strategy2030. This strategy will map out what is important for us to focus on over the next five years. We are taking stock of the work we have done since 2020 that has centred equity in the work we do for our clients and our service recipients. We are:
- Getting to know our clients: We know that the key to providing service with equitable outcomes means that we need to understand barriers to seeking care and work at eliminating those barriers. To that end, we have developed an understanding of how to collect data from our clients and engage them directly in conversation about what they need.
- Going to clients: Working with partners, we have developed new service lines that directly serve equity-deserving communities, such as our Community Outreach Intervention Initiative (COII), that meets clients where they are. We know that coming into a treatment centre can be a barrier to care, so we meet clients in their homes, their schools, their community centre, their libraries, and their community health centres or youth wellness hubs.
- Growing community access: We are working with The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in creating care pathways from the hospital to the community. We are participating with SickKids and CAMH in our Thriving Minds collaborative, which will make it easier for youth and families to access mental health information and referrals.
- Building staff awareness: We have incorporated mandatory equity, diversity, and inclusion training for all staff, and created a safer spaces statement for anyone who is in a GH-CCMH physical space, or community-based interaction. We have established an Anti-Black Racism, Anti-Oppression and Health Equity Advisory to make recommendations to senior leadership which then inform agency priorities and current projects.
CMHO is also calling for folks whose voices are often unheard in the mental health system – such as Black, Indigenous, racialized, 2SLGBTQIA+ – to tell their stories. If you have any equity concerns about accessing our services, please click on the button below. Your thoughts will inform Strategy2030, which will include our commitment to equity.
Neill Carson (he/him)
Executive Director
The Garry Hurvitz Centre for Community Mental Health (GH-CCMH) at SickKids provides a comprehensive range of early intervention and prevention programs, as well as child and family therapy, outreach, and intensive service. The Centre is part of the SickKids mental health continuum of services including psychiatry and the TeleLink Mental Health Program.
If you are looking for our Intensive Services for Children or Intensive Services for Youth , contact Help Ahead, the central point of intake for intensive mental health services for infants, children, youth and their families in Toronto. You may contact them by phone at 1-866-585-6486 or email helpahead@stridestoronto.ca.
To access our Individual and Family Services, please call our Mental Health Access Program at 416-924-1164, ext. 8708 to discuss service options for your family.
For information regarding all Toronto child mental health services, visit Help Ahead.
