Release of Ministry guidance

At the end of March, the Ministry of Health released three guidance documents to support Ontario Health Teams in their paths to maturity. As part of approved OHTs’ Transfer Payment Agreements (TPA), they must each develop a patient, family and caregiver partnership and engagement strategy, a protocol for primary-care communications, and a harmonized information-management plan. The three guidance documents provide OHTs with a base of knowledge to help them to develop each of these documents.

Each of the three guidance documents concludes with a series of resources that OHTs may wish to use. In addition, RISE has the following complementary resources that can help OHTs as they develop their approaches to engage patients, families and caregivers, communicate with primary-care providers and develop plans for harmonized information management:

• resources related to patient partnership and community engagement, which may be useful in developing partnership and engagement strategies
• online space for the community of practice for patients, families and caregivers, where teams can share their ideas with one another (after signing in, navigating to the OHT patients, families and caregivers community, and clicking ‘Join group’), and which is complemented by monthly teleconferences
• resources related to primary-care engagement, which may be useful for developing communication protocols
• RISE is in the process of updating our RISE brief on data analytics, which may be helpful to teams in considering existing sources of data that they may wish to draw on in their plans.