The Ontario Health-appointed supervisor leading reforms at a beleaguered mental health organization in Stratford is recommending a merger between Resilience Huron Perth and Choices for Change, a local addictions counseling centre.
The Ontario Health-appointed supervisor leading reforms at a beleaguered mental health organization in Stratford is recommending a merger between Resilience Huron Perth and Choices for Change, a local addictions counseling centre.
Resilience Huron Perth supervisor Claudia den Boer and Choices for Change executive director Catherine Hardman informed the Stratford area’s Ontario Health Team on Tuesday about their plans to move forward with the idea.
“A recent engagement session with mental health and addiction partners across Huron Perth strongly supported an integration given the benefits for clients, staff and partners in our communities,” den Boer and Hardman wrote in a letter shared with the Beacon Herald. “The board for Choices for Change and the supervisor (acting on behalf of Resilience Huron Perth) have expressed support for the integration.”
Both organizations receive funding from Ontario Health, a Crown agency that oversees much of the province’s health-care system. Details about the proposed merger will be in front of Ontario Health’s board of directors in August, den Boer and Hardman said.
If their plan is approved, a significant amount of mental health and addictions services in Huron and Perth counties will be combined.
“Being able to bring both of those services under one organization will really make it easier for people to navigate the system,” Hardman said. “The biggest thing for us is ensuring that our clients are at the center of all the decisions that we make. That’s why we’re very clear that there will be no interruption of services for clients from both organizations as we move through this.”
Formerly a branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association, Resilience Huron Perth became an independent agency at the end of January after the association’s Ontario office announced a decision to sever ties with the organization last year. The Canadian Mental Health Association Ontario did not publicly reveal specific issues but said in a statement at the time it had “significant concerns about a lack of desire from the branch’s leadership to enhance service delivery.”
In November, Ontario Health asked an independent investigator “to look into ongoing stakeholder concerns and ensure quality improvement.” The investigator’s report – completed in February – shed light on various “cultural issues” the organization has been grappling with over the past several yearsincluding two human resources investigations into staff complaints about being bullied and harassed by management.
In June, five employees were terminated, actions that are currently under litigation, the report said.
The report also recommended various governance reforms aimed at the agency’s board, including the establishment of term limits, a practice for holding meetings without management, and an external whistleblower hotline to handle staff complaints.
Robertson and the organization’s former board members said at the time they were caught off guard by the decision. They defended the agency’s track record supporting clients.
“I didn’t feel that the report identified issues that were so serious that (they) would require the … dissolution of the board,” Robertson said. “I’m surprised that this extreme action was taken.”
On Tuesday, den Boer declined to outline her reasons for the leadership change.
“That’s not something I really would like to focus on,” she said, but did address the recommendations in the report.
“I think it’s a very valid report and I think that all of the areas that (the investigator) identified are the areas that we’re going to be working on,” den Boer said Tuesday. “Some of them are already being addressed because they’re internal to Resilience, but I think that the report did a really good job of identifying where there needed to be some enhancement and some improvement. There certainly are lots of other great things about the organization that we’ll carry with us into the integration.”
Exploring a merger between Resilience and Choices for Change was recommended in the investigator’s February report.
Both organizations serve a number of the same clients, the report noted, including some eligible for government-funded housing. The potential merger will impact about 3,100 customers in total.
Hardman will become the new organization’s chief executive if Ontario Health provides its approval. As of the February report, both Resilience and Choices for Change employ about 30 people and oversee annual budgets of around $3 million.
Although integration may change the roles of some staff members, “there will be no job losses,” den Boer and Hardman said in their letter.
Mergers between mental health and addictions service providers have been common in Ontario. In the province’s southwest, three Canadian Mental Health Association branches in Elgin, Oxford, and Middlesex recently came together to become Addiction Services of Thames Valley.
“We’ll be reaching out to our colleagues there are definitely wanting to get some lessons learned from them,” den Boer said.