To the Leadership Triad:
The Ontario health care environment is changing – as we move towards better integrated care for our patients through the development of the Ontario Health Teams, AFHTO stays firm in our belief that a strong health care system will only exist if it is built on the foundation of primary care.
We continue to work on your behalf to educate the government on the importance of interprofessional team-based primary care as part of the solution to end hallway healthcare.
We are acutely aware that these are challenging times for you, our members. Recently, many of you received letters from the Ministry indicating a ‘right correcting’ of budgets to reflect historical spend over the last three years. This focus on the government’s goal of finding cost savings and efficiencies may have serious implications for our teams and their commitment to delivering patient centred care.
We strongly encourage you to let us know how the adjustments are impacting your teams and if front line delivery of care is going to be affected.
In the interest of finding efficiencies the Ministry has also informed us that they will be cutting funding to AFHTO. Retroactive to April 1st of this fiscal year, AFHTO’s QIDS Program (not the QIDSS in the field) will no longer receive funding support from the Ministry.
Funded since 2013, AFHTO’s QIDS Program was pivotal in creating a culture of improvement through the implementation of our innovative Data to Decisions (D2D) Program, supporting our QIDSS and teams in the field with knowledge transition events and positioning team-based primary care to be leaders in quality improvement and decision support.
A lot of that success was due to the phenomenal contributions and dedication from our various team members and we will always be grateful for that enthusiasm and continued support.
Despite this change in our funding situation, the AFHTO Board remains committed to supporting our teams in QI and knowledge translation. The Board has met and has confirmed that AFHTO’s priorities this year will focus on advocacy, governance support and quality. We are also looking at ways to support our members during these transformative times.
Despite these very challenging times, AFHTO’s very small team of staff are working hard to provide support and resources to our members to ensure they are ready to lead and continue to be a strong voice with the government and the policy-makers. And we thank each of you for being there to help us tell our story.
The next few months will be a period of priority setting and re-focus on what matters the most to our members given our current financial constraints but also the daunting health transformation ahead of us. We are looking at the members to provide guidance and support during these trying times and the Board will update you as we continue to learn more about how team-based primary care is being positioned in the Ontario Health and Ontario Health Team developments.
As always, thank you for your ongoing support and please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions and/or concerns.
Beth Cowper-Fung Kavita Mehta
President and Board Chair, AFHTO CEO, AFHTO
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