An Ecology of Care
COVID has stressed the need for a coordinated, system-aware focus on providing services that are responsive to unmet need and also adaptable and nimble. Individuals have heterogeneous needs and we are interested in utilizing evaluations to highlight how systems can better serve the diversity of needs. We term such a focus on a diversity of needs, an ecology of care.
The collaboration between Margaret’s and the Evaluation Centre has raised the following questions:
- How will an understanding of the syndemic processes of chronic homelessness inform better planning for the ongoing and future pandemics?
- Can a comparative analysis of Respite facilities help better understand factors associated with successful responses to the pandemic?
- What role does research and evaluation play in creating better awareness of the value of community organizations in an ecology of care?
- How can there be a clearer prioritization of the importance of community organizations in responding to the pandemic? What are more equitable ways of distributing testing kits, PPE, etc.?
- How does one manage fatigue/stress among frontline staff addressing homelessness given the long hours and extreme stress that they are facing during the pandemic? Going forward how does one build surplus capacity in community organizations given the potential organizational disruptions caused by the pandemic?
- Can more be done to leverage such changes in political climate to create policy and practice solutions as a response to the pandemic that are aligned across the three levels of government?
- How do we think more systemically about solutions that are more client-sensitive and especially acknowledge challenges of anxiety and depression among some marginalized populations?
- What are processes going forward to develop better communication protocols between the hospitals/public health sector and the community sector during future pandemics?
- How does one create a more caring, coordinated system of care in which organizations don’t feel alone in responding to a pandemic?
- Going forward, for some interventions, are there hybrid models in which face-to-face solutions can be combined with online solutions for some clients?
We believe that addressing the above points both through individual evaluations of community care organizations’ experiences and through generating solutions systemically perhaps through a systems-focused developmental evaluation process might be needed. It’s important we do not treat the issues raised above as just realities affecting one organization. Solutions that we arrive at within Ontario will in all likelihood have relevance in other settings.