CHEO seeks funding to create mental health and special needs ‘hub’
The Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario wants to bring its mentalhealth and special needs services under one roof with a $140-million addition to its Smyth Road campus.
The province approved operational plans for the six-storey, 200,000-square-foot building three years ago, but it has yet to commit any money to the expansion.
“We’re hopeful that the provincial budget, which is coming soon, will include a capital allocation for this much-needed project,” said CHEO president and CEO Alex Munter.
Munter said the building would serve as a “hub” for children with disabilities who need special services, such as physiotherapy, occupational therapy and early-childhood programming. It would also knit together CHEO’s scattered mental-health services.
The integrated treatment facility would be built on land west of CHEO’s main entrance on what is now a parking lot for hospital staff.
Munter said the project would vastly improve the treatment experience for some 40,000 families since they’d be able to go to one facility built for children with disabilities and special needs.
Currently, CHEO rents eight locations across the region to deliver specialized services. That means, for instance, the family of a child with autism and depression has to travel to separate clinics in different parts of the city for treatment, adding stress to already difficult lives, Munter said.
The hospital spends more than $1 million a year on rent, and the new building would allow it to redirect that money toward improving services and reducing wait times, he said.
CHEO has rented space in an office building at 311 McArthur Rd. for decades.
“This was never meant to be an outpatient mental-health clinic,” said David Murphy, CHEO’s manager of mental-health ambulatory care service, during a tour of the facility. “It was always just a wide open space meant for cubicles.”
The clinic is divided into small, odd-shaped offices with narrow hallways. It has a cramped reception area and only two rooms large enough to hold group meetings. The rooms are not soundproof — creating confidentiality issues — and do not have sufficient security features, said Barbara Casey, CHEO’s director of mental-health services.
The clinic’s 25 staff members help hundreds of young people diagnosed with anxiety and depression.
“Why should a kid who has anxiety or depression receive services in a place that looks depressed?” asked Casey.
She said a modern facility at CHEO is desperately needed.
“I have spent a long time in this business and the thing that consistently offends me is the fact that most mental-health and addiction spaces — The Royal is an exception — are inadequate. Why do mentalhealth patients have to have locations and spaces like this?”
Planning began a decade ago and included extensive consultation with CHEO families. One mother said she has three children who have been treated for anxiety or depression at 311 MacArthur Rd.
“The office was about the size of a bathroom in a 1960s house,” she said. “My kids felt like they were shoved in a closet: There was no room for them to process what they were thinking.”
Munter said construction of the new facility would take about three years. Similar integrated treatment centres have already opened in the Hamilton-Wentworth, Halton and Peel regions.
The new facility would house all of the programs now funded by the Ministry of Children and Youth Services, including specialized programs for eating disorders, autism, mental health, sexual assault, telepsychiatry and early language development.
The hospital is calling its current awareness campaign #1Door4Care.