Implementing leading practices in regional-level primary care workforce planning: Lessons learned in Toronto.

Investment in capacity for implementation of leading practices in regional-level health workforce planning is essential to support equitable distribution of resources and deployment of a health workforce that can meet local needs. Ontario Health Toronto and the Canadian Health Workforce Network (CHWN) co-developed and operationalized an integrated workforce planning process to support evidence-based primary care workforce decision-making for the Toronto region. The resultant planning toolkit incorporates planning processes centred around engagement with stakeholders, including environmental scanning tools and a quantitative planning model.

Teaming up for long-term care: Recognizing all long-term care staff contribute to quality care.

When looking to promising international approaches to improve quality care in long-term care, it is necessary to avoid cherry-picking specific dimensions ignoring the integrated nature of what makes these approaches promising in the first place. In looking at promising Scandinavian or Green House models, attention is often paid to the size of facility. This often overlooks the importance of higher level of staffing, mix, and compensation of direct care staff and the integration of dietary, laundry, and housekeeping staff to care teams.

Out from the shadows: What health leaders should do to advance the mental health and substance use health workforce.

The Mental Health and Substance Use Health (MHSUH) impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are proving to be significant, complex, and long-lasting. The MHSUH workforce-including psychologists, social workers, psychotherapists, addiction counsellors, and peer support workers as well as psychiatrists, family physicians, and nurses-is the backbone of the response. As health leaders consider how to address long-standing and emerging health workforce challenges, there is an opportunity to move the MHSUH workforce out from the shadows through full inclusion in health workforce planning in Canada.

The pathway from mental health, leaves of absence, and return to work of health professionals: Gender and leadership matter.

Health professions are ranked among the most stressful occupations and have a much higher likelihood of absenteeism from work. In this article, we present findings from four health professional case studies in our Healthy Professional Worker partnership, involving surveys with 1,860 respondents and 163 interviews with nurses, physicians, midwives, and dentists conducted between December 2020 and April 2021. We found that the pathway from mental health experiences through to the decision to take a leave of absence and return to work differed between the health professions and that both gender and leadership matter greatly.

Interpersonal Psychotherapy for Depression in Parkinson's Disease: A Feasibility Study.

Individuals living with Parkinson's disease (PD) experience interpersonal stressors that contribute to depressive risk. Interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) emphasizes the bidirectional relationship between interpersonal stressors and mood may therefore be a suitable treatment for PD-depression. The primary aim of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of delivering 12 sessions of IPT to depressed PD patients and explore the need for modifications.

Leadership for quality in long-term care.

Leadership in long-term care is a burgeoning field of research, particularly that which is focused on enabling point of care staff to provide high-quality and responsive healthcare. In this article, we focus on the relatively important role that leadership plays in enabling the conditions for high-quality long-term care. Our methodological approach involved a rapid in-depth ethnography undertaken by an interdisciplinary team across eight public and non-profit long-term care homes in Canada, where we conducted over 1,000 hours of observations and 275 formal and informal interviews with managers, staff, residents, family members and volunteers.

A self-assessment tool for healthcare and social service provision in French: What use for managers?

Language is an important determinant of health, and lack of access to quality, linguistically adapted healthcare and social services negatively impacts users. Besides the lack of bilingual resources, our previous research on Francophone minority community seniors' trajectories through these services shed light on important and nonobvious challenges currently faced by organizations offering healthcare and social services to this population. Current service provision appeared limited due to organizations working in silos with suboptimally used resources for integrating active offer of French language services throughout the continuum of care.