News from the Centre
The Health Services Restructuring Commission set out clear directives for the
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) when it was created in 1998, including
a mandate to continue the provincial focus of the former Addiction Research Foundation
and to expand this role to include mental health. CAMH's provincial role was also
reinforced by its strategic planning process. In keeping with this commitment, the
Com-munications, Education and Community Health (CECH) department was created to
enhance the transfer of knowledge and best practices within the system across Ontario.
To do this, CECH recently completed a strategic planning process involving consultation
with CAMH staff and stakeholders across the province. Although the consultations
reinforced many of our existing roles and functions, our stakeholders have recommended
that we further focus our work and explore mechanisms -- including technology and
other alternate delivery mechanisms -- for doing our work differently.
We developed a shared, common vision and mission for our work with our many internal
and external partners, addressing people, communities and systems across the province.
This mission focuses on working with partners to identify addiction and mental health
related needs; developing and disseminating best practices through programs, policies,
tools, training and public education; and working together in system planning to
enhance the co-ordination of addiction and mental health services.
Given the breadth of both our vision and mission, we have identified three strategic
provincial priorities for our work over the next three to five years. CECH continues
its lead role in health promotion, and we have identified three major focal areas:
-- Concurrent disorders:
working with both the addictions and mental health systems to help improve the treatment
and care of people with concurrent disorders across Ontario;
-- Youth: working with a wide
range of youth services, education and health care providers to address prevention,
health promotion and treatment of addiction and mental health problems among children
and youth;
-- Diversity: identifying a select number of key groups and issues in various
regions and working closely with external stakeholders and CAMH's corporate Diversity
Office to identify and respond to both addiction and mental health issues.
As a final step in our planning process, we developed a new CECH organizational
structure to help us build the capacity to efficiently and effectively implement
the mission and goals of the portfolio.
Through integrated planning and co-ordination with external partners and other
key areas of CAMH, we look forward to the positive effects these changes will have
on our work throughout the province and within CAMH.
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