Thank you.
I'm Tammy Cumming from the UW-Schlegel Research Institute for Aging in Waterloo, Ontario. I'm here to talk a little bit about a program that I'm responsible for there. It's a Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care-funded program called the Ontario Centres for Learning, Research, and Innovation in Long-term Care. This program is co-run by three organizations: the UW-Schlegel Research Institute for Aging in Waterloo, Baycrest Health Sciences in Toronto, and the Bruyère Research Institute in Ottawa.
We've been leading this program for a number of years and we just received renewed funding in the summer of 2017. The program's goal is essentially to support long-term care homes in building capacity by identifying and developing various resources to improve the quality of care and the quality of living for residents in long-term care.
The scope can be pretty broad. Today, I'm just going to talk a little about some of the work we are starting to kick off around supporting indigenous residents in long-term care.
In 2016, there were some identified gaps in some of the work we were doing in terms of addressing indigenous people's needs in long-term care. Stakeholder feedback in long-term care was giving us this information, and then the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care was also identifying a need for us to address it. Therefore, we conducted a needs assessment, and we finished it in 2017. The needs assessment was basically trying to identify some gaps, and if there was anything that the program could do within its mandate to address those gaps.
The needs assessment involved interviews and meetings with some stakeholders in long-term care, and we had an advisory committee of people who were familiar with indigenous culture and long-term care supporting it as well.
There were a number of key findings and there's a full report about it. Some of the key findings I wanted to bring up today were that indigenous people have unique cultural needs that we need to be addressing and valuing when we're caring for them in long-term care. There's a growing body of evidence that suggests that when we're restoring culture and we're embracing culture, it can contribute to healing, and it may even have a protective factor for worsening health when in long-term care.
The other finding was that there's a lot of history in this country's legacy of colonization, historical trauma, racism, distrust in western medicine, and those are very unique considerations that we need to take into account when we're trying to address indigenous residents in long-term care, as well.
There's a real need to develop and identify resources that are already out there, and spread them across all long-term care homes, not just the long-term care homes that have the bulk of the indigenous residents but all the long-term care homes. This was one thing we heard from some of the stakeholders, the long-term care homes, that they have an indigenous resident moving into their home and they don't know how to ensure that they're supported culturally.
Of course, as always, it's really important for us to be partnering with indigenous people and organizations when we're doing any work.
Following the needs assessment, it was very evident that there was a role for the program in addressing and doing some of this work, but we weren't experts in indigenous culture, so, of course, we needed to identify partners and decided we wanted to form an advisory circle. That's primarily what I am going to talk about for the last few minutes here.
We spent some time thinking about the advisory circle, and we wanted members on the advisory circle to be experienced in long-term care and indigenous culture, but also to be representative of the northern and southern regions of Ontario as well. We began a bunch of phone calls and interviews to identify members for this circle. Without having an advisory circle to guide our work, we decided we'd better have some indigenous people on our team to help us with this recruitment work, so we hired an indigenous project assistant, and we had an indigenous facilitator guiding the process of recruitment. That was really important.
Once we finally identified the 11 members, we formally sent them a letter of invitation and included tobacco ties as a gift to show that we were wanting to incorporate their culture into the work we're doing.
We are happy to say six weeks ago to the day today we had our inaugural meeting. It was really very important for us to have an in-person meeting with the committee members. Nine of the 11 members were able to show up in person. We spent the entire meeting focused on building relationships and defining the way we were going to be working, so essentially an entire meeting about building the terms of reference for that advisory circle.
The meeting was like no other I've attended. I've not sat in on too many conversations about building terms of reference but it was grounded in partnerships and collaborations. Together the advisory circle officially named itself the Ontario Caring Advisory Circle, OCAC is the acronym, and they defined their mandate, which I want to read to you. It is, “The Ontario Caring Advisory Circle demonstrates leadership by guiding the identification and development of culturally appropriate resources to support indigenous residents in long-term care.”
The other important piece of that inaugural meeting was that we defined a consensus decision-making model, giving all members an opportunity to speak at all times and contribute to decisions. Given that most of our meetings will be via teleconference, we felt it was really important that we adopted a model where there was an opportunity for everyone to speak at all times and not the type of meetings where two or three people speak and the others are simply nodding in the background. We defined that very clearly. That was very effective in bonding us and feeling coordinated in the work moving forward.
We are six weeks from that inaugural meeting. We've had one teleconference, an invitation to speak in the House of Commons, and we've also been asked to consult in some research projects for another organization. We feel the need is there and that the resource of the circle itself may be the most valuable resource in the spectrum.
At this time, I'd like to pass to Teresa and Vincent, both members of the Ontario Caring Advisory Circle. Teresa is going to speak from her perspective of this experience, and Vincent is here to support her.