Carlington CHC (CCHC) is a Community Health Centre in Ottawa that has been serving their community since 1985. They offer many services from pre-natal support, breastfeeding support, child readiness, primary care, mental health supports, programs to aid women in violent circumstances and have crisis and intake programs. Their mission is to create safe and equitable community-centred approaches that celebrate diversity while fostering an empathetic and caring environment that promotes well-being and allows individuals to feel heard, recognized, welcomed, and empowered.

During Covid, CCHC developed a successful multifaceted perinatal and parent support program which has addressed long standing AND emergent gaps for those in pregnancy and parenting in the first few months. This program became integral to accessing timely information and referral in a climate where access to free prenatal education was next to nil (Health units diverted all dollars to COVID), care was and still is delayed or often minimal, and follow-up post-delivery with a newborn was difficult when so many clients are without primary care providers.  This program also supports breastfeeding prenatally and postpartum and provides programming which supports parents mental health (especially those experiencing anxiety and or depression) and infant child mental health.

The goal of the SNAP Project is to help CHCs adopt, adapt, scale up, and improve systems navigation efforts to improve client outcomes and grow the CHC knowledge and practice base across Canada and help improve overall healthcare access for equity-deserving populations in Canada and overcome barriers to accessing services and continuity of care.

CACHC asked Carlington Community Health Centre to tell us about their SNAP Project and it’s impact so far. Here are their responses.

Our SNAP funding is allowing us to Evaluate our Perinatal Parent Support Program and improve system navigation for the participants of the program.  Our evaluation is looking at
1.         Systems navigation experience;
2.         Changes in attitude, knowledge, and behavior;
3.         Maternal and infant outcomes.

During COVID many resources for pregnant families were cut or diverted. That reduction in service is still evident and there seems to be very slow, if any, movement toward increasing funding/programming back to pre-pandemic levels. Even if it recovers, there were huge gaps in continuity of care for new families which this project has addressed. A good example of this is the lack of quality prenatal education. Almost all of the health units in Ontario only have online (not virtual or facilitated) prenatal education resources which creates huge barriers. We created sessions that are accessible, have a live presenter who can also answer questions in real time, is ongoing from pregnancy to 6 month postpartum and is responsive to client needs. And this is just one gap which we have addressed.

An external, professional evaluation analysis of this flagship program will make on-going funding easier to secure.  It will validate the information which we are receiving from clients and community partners alike, which has been suggesting that this model is unique, powerful, scalable, adaptable and could have a profound impact on client outcomes, systems access and health literacy across the province.  Having the data to validate our current survey results will help us improve, scale up and make this program more accessible to any other CHC’s wanting to learn from and implement this model in their own communities. We are committed to evidence-based programming and we believe this model to be scalable all over Ontario with similar results.

More funding will help continue and scale this programming. This model works! Our clients tell us so! We will continue to collect data that has been refined through the SNAP grant and continue to search for stable adequate funding.