Centre Stage:
Glenna Raymond, Chief Executive Officer with the Whitby Mental Health Centre, in Whitby Ontario
As part of our new membership benefit package and our ongoing commitment to collaboration, we are giving impassioned improvers within the Network centre stage. We would like to get to know the faces of your organization. If you have a member that should get centre stage, let us know.
“At Whitby Mental Health Centre community is one of our core values. We think about community in the sense of a community of interest among people that share a common goal, and ours is to advance mental health care.”
I’m Glenna Raymond. I was recruited to be the inaugural President and CEO at Whitby Mental Health Centre in December 2005. I was hired to do some of the preparation and lead up work to divest the previous provincial psychiatric hospital. Two years later, I now oversee the operation of a tertiary specialized mental health care facility that offers tertiary specialized services to a population of 2.8 million people in the Central East and Central LHIN. We cover four different LHINs in our primary service area and have some programs with a provincial mandate.
At Whitby Mental Health Centre, community is one of our core values. We think about community in the sense of a community of interest among people that share a common goal, and ours is to advance mental health care. We also think of a community in terms of each unit. But in order to move forward the recovery philosophy of mental health care, we need to work with clients and caregivers together in a shared purpose.
“I think I’m a very collaborative leader. I am committed to open and transparent communication. I’m committed to working with others. I am a leader who relies heavily on a team of people to accomplish what needs to get done and creates focus to a shared vision.”
I’ve been in health care for 30 years. I have held a variety of positions in both acute care, the education sector and in mental health. I originally trained as a registered nurse, but then went on to complete a science degree and a masters degree in business administration.
Prior to divestment, the hospital didn’t have a board of directors, they had a community advisory board. In order to be a pubic hospital functioning under the Public Hospitals Act, Whitby required a Board of Directors and one of their first tasks was to recruit a CEO. What I really brought to the task was the experience in public hospital operations leadership. I was also very familiar with capacity building and the challenges of the public hospital sector. I served on a number of boards myself and understood the governance development piece. I have had a long-standing interest in both governance and mental health.
“I really saw the mental health field as the next challenge in our system, or the next frontier if you like. One in four Canadians are going to need mental health help in the future.”
The opportunities in the mental health field are vast. It wasn’t developed to the same extent the rest of our health care system was, in particular the aspects related to measurement, safety and accountability for quality. For me, it was a wonderful opportunity. I was almost given a green page if you like. There was almost 100 years of history of caregiving at Whitby under the provincial psychiatric system, but no time under the public hospital system. It was a wonderful opportunity for me to merge those two worlds. I recognize that mental health care is quite different then general hospital care and acute care. Mental health is so dependent on other determinants in people’s lives. There are such strong connections with mental health and poverty, nutrition, the justice system, the education system. That multi-sector environment attracted me.
We have seen the significant influence that mental health has on the quality of people’s lives. The Statistics that we are starting to see with the incidence of mental health and the deaths associated with mental illness demonstrate there is such a huge opportunity here for improvement.
“There is also such a public misunderstanding of what we do in mental health care. If we are going to gain the trust of the public, the trust of the communities that we serve, if we are going to make a difference, then we have to be able to impact quality in a very positive way.”
I am passionate about making a difference in the health of our communities.
To me health is very broad. I’m thinking of quality of life when I say health. I’m not just referring to the absence of illness. I’m really talking about making a difference in the quality of life for people in our communities.
Improving safety in the mental health system is so important. It’s a segment of the health care system that probably has had the least attention.
“Joining the Quality Healthcare Network (QHN) and the Safer Healthcare Now! initiative was really not an option. That’s the movement that’s there in the system. The supports are there. Why would we try and do it alone?”
To me, based on my past experience in healthcare, no single institution can do it alone. When I joined the Whitby Mental Health Centre, part of building the infrastructure of a public hospital, building the system and processes to function in that environment, I knew we really needed to strengthen the supports we had in the area of risk, safety and communications.
Joining the network was part of what we are able to offer our own staff that are working in the areas of quality and safety. By being a member of QHN there is a much broader degree of support for them and for their work.
The challenges for us are that much of the work that’s been done in the area of quality and patient safety has not been focused on mental health care.
“Although there was no hesitation on my part in joining QHN and signing us up for the Safer Healthcare Now! campaign, I think there is a need to push the safety agenda to include a mental health focus.”
In other areas of health care, there are “care bundles” for particular quality problems that a hospital is trying to tackle. For example, there is a care bundle or set of interventions that says: ‘this is what you need to do to address this problem, this is where the improvement will come, implement this bundle and care will be safer.’ Well, in mental health care there are no predetermined bundles. There isn’t even a common definition of what the top challenges for patient safety and quality improvement are.
Together, within the mental health system and the QHN, I hope that we can really influence the degree of attention that mental health safety issues get and therefore, collectively find some solutions.
“We were the first mental health organization to join the Quality Healthcare Network and enroll in the Safer Healthcare Now! campaign. We hoped that if we signed on, then we could demonstrate that there is significant value in mental health facilities being apart of the quality improvement dialogue.”
We have to work together to make that change happen. Over the past years, again, as I was looking at the healthcare and safety initiatives from some of my other work prior to joining Whitby, I was well aware that the mental health sector had not joined in the program. I’d been involved with the patient safety advisory group that the Ontario Hospital Association had put together and was aware from some of our discussions there, that the mental health sector had not stepped up at that point to participate in the QHN activities. I hope our joining has sparked some of that interest, sparked the recognition that we need to help the QHN and Safer Healthcare Now! and adapt the program to provide support to the mental health sector.
“Involving our clients in shaping their own care is perhaps one area in which the mental health sector can share their expertise with network members, belonging to the broader healthcare community.”
In the mental health environment we need to be diligent about involving our clients. In order for clients to recover, they must be involved in shaping their care and participate quite actively in care decisions. That also carries forward that we would involve them in quality initiatives and patient safety initiatives in ways that other organizations wouldn’t necessarily do. Perhaps other institutions haven’t thought as deliberately about this – in patients shaping the quality and safety of their care.
Centre Stage Index
To view past profiles of impassioned improvers within the Network, click the one that you want to read.
December, 2007, Gordon Milak from Southwest Community Care Access Centre, London, Ontario
January, 2008, Glenna Raymond from Whitby Mental Health Centre, Whitby, Ontario
February, 2008, Michael Heenan from St. Joseph’s Healthcare, Hamilton, Ontario
Spring, 2008, Carol Annett from CEO of VHA Home HealthCare, Ontario
Summer, 2008, Ben Chan, CEO, Ontario Health Quality Council
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