Dear Executive Directors/Admin Leads,
As part of the pandemic response, in 2020/21 the Ministry rolled out an initiative that provided interprofessional teams with one-time funding to deal with mental health and addiction (MHA) care backlog in your clinics. Despite the very late roll out of funding it was great to see how so many teams were able to step up and provide much needed support for their patients and their communities.
We are getting some intel that there may be another MHA one-time investment again this year – this time with an October 1st to Mach 31st timeframe. The funding would be more substantive and, if approved, could be used to flexibly to support MHA work in your organization, similarly to the last one time investment. If approved, it could be used for any or all of the following:
- hire staff,
- increase the FTE of current staff,
- purchase services from publicly funded and/or private MHA providers,
- overhead costs, administrative and logistics support including space for groups,
- purchasing of workbooks for patients and other supports that are needed to increase access to MHA support in primary care.
This funding could also be pooled with other interprofessional teams in your region. This funding would not include an increase in psychiatry sessionals.
The goal of this funding would be to address the backlog of MHA challenges in the community, but this is still in early discussions and there are no commitments being made yet. We would be interested to know if there are any challenges or barriers (aside from the general HHR shortage), to implementing this type of funding again, should it become available. As the Ministry continues planning to deal with the increased MHA challenges in the province, we want to ensure that primary care is not forgotten in those discussions. Once we hear something definitively we will let you know.
Sincerely,
Your AFHTO Team
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