Guess who met with Health Minister Christine Elliot and has the pic to prove it! LOL
Yup. Me. And 7 other provincial peer support & lived experience (patient)/family (caregiver) advisers/advocates on Monday April 8th 2019. It was very exciting to have a full 90 minutes with Hon. Christine Elliot (Health Minister), Tim Hadwen (Assistant Deputy Minister, Community, Mental Health and Addiction & French Languages Services) and Patrick Mitchell (Director Mental Health and Addictions Policy, Accountability and Provincial Partnerships) in the Health Minister's board room. We were all given plenty of time to share our personal lived and/or family experience plus represent the work we lead (peer support providers/family advocacy). We were also given an opportunity to advise on some ideas that the Ministry was working on.
Health Minister Elliot has a smile that lights up a room. She is really engaging. She is very passionate about the expertise of lived experience (patient)/family (caregivers) and ensuring the empowerment of those voices to drive better outcomes.
Here are all the people:
Mike Creek, Working for Change
Dawnmarie Harriot, Choices for Change/Voices from the Streets
Cynthia Clark, Parents Lifelines of Eastern Ontario
Sarah Cannon, Parents for Children's Mental Health
Hon. Christine Elliot, Health Minister
(Me)..Betty-Lou Kristy, Centre for Innovation in Peer Support
Barbara Frampton, Ontario Peer Development Initiative
Susan Dobson, Krassman Centre
Oh..and for Jason and Nandini. You will be very happy to know that I handed the Minister 10 copies of the Promising Practice feature product that you created for the Centre. That has been one of our most valuable communication/knowledge exchange tools (attached as a PDF and link below for EENet Connect lauch of that product.)
Centre for Innovation in Peer Support: A Promising Practice
[@mention:309368104279138400] [@mention:308523583281947825] [@mention:338933238319409724] [@mention:359768822747780657] [@mention:305145748651503069]
Awesome for you...were you able to discuss the well needed health care that our elders and most vulnerable need in our country?❤️
Outstanding! All familiar faces, too! Looking fabulously advocat-ive.
Great stuff, [@mention:309227366772673999] and great word choice ("advocat-ive"), [@mention:323163133365656113]!
Hi Dylan
When you posted..... "All familiar faces".... I felt that I should take the time to update the post and name all the peer/lived experience/family advisers in the picture, and what agencies/initiatives they come from. (Rachel Cooper was there as well but had to leave before the picture was taken).
The coolest feeling about the invited people around the table is that all of us have worked together for many years in different ways so we were all very in-sync with each other and therefore we were all able to almost intuitively pick up, where the other left off, which was such a unique and robust way to collectively use the time allotted for each of us. We definitely empowered each other and there was magic in the room.
(Get Barb to tell you about her "locked in a Ministry stairwell story). She made us all laugh with that one! (including the Health Minister). Oh, and the Ministry facilitator for the session had shared that she was a bit "scattered" because she had a bad morning with her young teens and therefore had both of their phones locked up in her back pack as a "punishment". Then she went back into facilitator mode and was explaining our strict timeline criteria for each question/section (5 minutes each per section). She said she would "count us down" when we got to two minutes and then one minute, and then she wasn't sure what she would do once we hit the time limit and didn't stop. I suggested she could take our phones away and put them into her backpack! (Everyone laughed). It was very "peer-like". Very warm, supportive and powerful.
Thank you Betty-Lou!
I will ask Barb while in a full room. ;D
Really fantastic (and reassuring) to hear about such a good energy among you in that room. We are so diverse, yet share the same values.
Thank you to you and all the peer advocates for your work.
Betty-Lou, were you able to find out if there are any lived experience on the Appropriateness Working Group? That is the group that is making the decisions on all the cuts but as far as I can tell it is only medical professionals and government, no lived experience peers. It's this group that is choosing to make the cuts to psychoanalytic psychotherapy, nerve blocks, and other health care cuts.
Hi Gwen. It was very structured 90 minutes but very valuable. There was no discussion regarding this group that you have mentioned.
Looks awesome. Would have been great to have a few more northern faces there. We have some great advocates in the north! Don't forget us!
Hi Shana. I agree. None of us knew who was invited till we arrived. We certainly will promote more voices if another opportunity to engage comes along.