NWO's passion for health care reflected in award

Letter to the Editor,
Northwest’s Passion for Health Care Reflected in International Public Participation Award

Thanks to the enormous response from the people of the North West LHIN, our Share Your Story, Shape Your Care community engagement project has won an international award.

The project was recognized as the Innovation using Technology Award in the Annual International Core Values Awards of the International Association for Public Participation. This award category acknowledges those who have included social media strategies in their public participation.

With a population spread across 458,000 square kilometres, the challenge for the North West LHIN was to provide every person – whether in one of our remote, rural or urban communities – the same opportunity to share their health care priorities, stories and ideas to help shape the future of health care in the region. To do this, we launched Share Your Story, Shape Your Care – an online community engagement process that involved interactive web-based participation tools in combination with paper copies for those without computers and conversation guides for group discussions and input.

Over 800 people participated showing how passionate our communities are about health care. We thank you for participating in the Share Your Story, Shape Your Care project. Your involvement helped the project earn this recognition and provided us with valuable input for our health system planning. The reports and storybook from the project are available on our website at www.northwestlhin.on.ca.

All of the information collected through Share Your Story, Shape Your Care and our other community engagement activities has been used to inform our next Integrated Health Services Plan (IHSP) for the years 2010 to 2013. The IHSP, which is to be released later this year, will outline health care priorities to build a better health care system and move closer to realizing our vision for the northwest: Healthier people, a strong health system – our future.

–Janice Beazley, Chair
North West LHIN Board of Directors

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