Message from the Chair and
President
Financial snapshot
Financial Statements March
2002 (PDFonly)
Statistics
Contacts (Board and
Senior Management)
How to Reach Us
Vision Mission Values
Partnership Profiles
First Episode Psychosis
Dual Diagnosis Partnerships
Support in the Baltics
Aboriginal Partnerships
Educating Students about Drug
Use
Addiction Services Boosted
in Scarborough
Salary Disclosure Act
Message
from the Chair and President
The importance of partnerships
It's impossible to imagine our Centre without its
many indispensable partners. From the largest (the University of Toronto
and the provincial government) to the smallest (each of nearly 800 volunteers), partners help us improve the health and well-being
of clients and enable our Centre to be part of a larger, integrated system
of care.
Our multi-year, public
education campaign that aims to remove barriers
impeding people from seeking treatment for addiction and mental health
problems illustrates successful partnering with the private sector. Demonstrating
their commitment through the donation of $850,000 for goods and services
for this campaign, award-winning designers Remtulla EURO RSCG contributed
their creative talent, Chatelaine magazine gave promotional support
and a myriad of printed publications donated space for the ads, which
focused on depression and alcohol problems.
Another innovative example is the "Building
Bridges, Breaking Barriers" pilot program, which aims to improve
access to the Centre's general psychiatry and addiction services. This
program started with five ethno-racial and ethno-cultural community partners.
A third example is our partnership with the Acquired
Brain Injury Network of Toronto. Through this partnership, we developed
100 training videos and 500 training manuals to help cross-train addiction
and brain injury providers across the province.
Progress in strategic directions
The "never-ending story" is how we could
describe the Centre's progress in achieving our strategic directions.
We continually review plans developed more than three years ago and work
to build on our achievements.
Ongoing client satisfaction surveys help us gauge
progress in client-centred care, and we are seeing improvements. Part
of the credit can be attributed to new empowerment and family councils
and a client relations co-ordinator. To improve survey results, some programs
are holding focus groups with clients to learn more about clients' needs.
We are also working on two more client-directed initiatives, a declaration
of client rights and a consumer resource centre.
Major advances in research
Evidence-based research is necessary to provide the best client care. Our
research budget has grown to $29 million -- more than double the amount
since our merger in 1998. This demonstrates that our researchers can compete
with the best anywhere -- nationally and internationally.
Centre scientists and researchers received 10 research
awards in the latest Canadian Institutes of Health Research awards, for
a total of more than $4 million -- an outstanding competition result.
We have been working with the World Health Organization (WHO) on joint
WHO/CAMH projects, and have established an international research training
centre for researchers from developing countries.
Examples of the diversity of our research and its
wide-ranging impact include: gambling studies, studies to make bars safer,
exploring the genetics of nicotine dependence, using a positron
emission tomography (PET) scanner to determine
medication dosing, conducting the Ontario
Student Drug Use Survey and studying how psychotherapy
works.
A new PET scanner, which allows us to look at chemical
activity in the brain, will be arriving this summer. In addition to our
current, impressive roster of professionals, a PET physicist will be joining
the staff, to help develop the technology necessary to use this new state-of-the-art
equipment.
Commitment to diversity
Our commitment to diversity arose out of our desire
to be inclusive, accountable and effective as we work with our diverse
stakeholders. We are developing a diversity policy framework to formalize
our commitment. We've already facilitated introductory diversity training
for over 1,000 staff, senior management and the Board of Trustees. We
launched a harassment and discrimination policy at all sites; this policy
is the result of months of work developed through an unprecedented partnership
between unions and management.
The Centre hosted its first staff forum on invisible
and visible disabilities in December 2001, and will be hosting a similar
forum on lesbian/gay/ bisexual/ transgendered issues this June. An active
Diversity Steering Committee has been spearheading the planning for an
international conference on diversity and health in 2003/04.
Challenges
As part of our site
redevelopment, we will tackle a number of issues
already faced by the entire mental health/addiction system, including
lack of access to care, fragmentation of services and stigma, while we
continue to care for clients every single day.
Recruitment and retention of the best
staff will undoubtedly be an issue for the decade as we
foster the next generation of multidisciplinary healthcare providers.
Healthcare costs have grown dramatically. We are
looking for other ways to increase revenue to do all the things we want
to do. Our Foundation
has been a big help in increasing funding for us, which helps to cover
the costs of client bursaries, staff education and much more.
Accomplishments
This past March, our Centre prepared for accreditation
and received the highest rating for this review, which occurs every three
years. Among the many noted achievements, we are especially proud of our
high rating in "commitment to serving the communities of the province."
We have sharpened our focus on the Centre's provincial
role by identifying three priority areas for the next three to five years:
concurrent
disorders, diversity and youth.
We are making major changes to programs and services
in preparation for a central
hub that will consolidate our operations to
the Queen Street site and enable us to offer our clients the best in care.
This will be a new mental health and addiction facility housed within
a unique urban village. We hope to begin construction early in 2004, pending
all the necessary approvals.
In the meantime, we continue to improve client
care with a new 60-bed, Integrated Rehabilitation Unit for long-term clients,
to make their setting as home-like and rehabilitative as possible. We
are also combining geriatrics and neuro-psychiatry and integrating child
psychiatry and youth addictions into a single child and adolescent program.
None of these accomplishments could have been achieved
without our innumerable partnerships. This report highlights six more
examples.
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Pamela Fralick
Chair
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Paul Garfinkel
President & CEO
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