Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

A critical gap persists in ensuring that the voices of all Ontarians, especially those from marginalized and underserved communities, are involved in the improvement of Ontario's cancer system. The current Ontario Health-Cancer Care Ontario (OH-CCO) Patient and Family advisory (PFA) group, while valuable, does not fully capture the breadth of perspectives needed to create equitable, inclusive, and responsive services due to the low diversity within the group. The division of System Improvement and Implementation (SII) at Ontario Health-Cancer Care Ontario (OH-CCO) has partnered with the Institute for Better Health at Trillium Health Partners on a project to address sub-optimal experiences and wait times in the diagnostic phase, with a focus on health equity. The project aim is two-fold: i) establish a replicable process and structure for engaging people with lived experience from high priority populations to inform design of a responsive cancer diagnosis model, and ii) to develop the capacity of the knowledge users (i.e., SII team) to initiate and manage these engagement tables for sustainable partnership with communities. This replicable process for engaging individuals with lived experience from high priority populations is currently being piloted and evaluated, with the goal of creating end-to-end guidelines for system implementation and adaptation to different settings and contexts.