Team lead Johanne McCarthy calls the role ‘personal and purposeful’

A newly created Indigenous health team at St. Joe’s is building trust and fostering change to help ensure Indigenous Peoples feel welcome and able to get the care they need at the hospital.  

The team’s creation came as the hospital “looked at past experiences and from our patients and opportunities to really try to make a lasting change in how we provide safe, effective and culturally safe care to Indigenous patients,” says Brooke Cowell, executive vice president of clinical operations and chief nursing executive at St. Joe’s.  

The team will be empowered to lead and guide our direction, as St. Joe’s commits to Truth and Reconciliation calls to action, to improve the healthcare we are providing.  

The team’s creation follows calls to action from the commission. A grant from BMO is helping to support the Indigenous health team. 

“It is about reconciliation, understanding Indigenous histories of exclusion and then welcoming inclusion and belonging of Indigenous health back into these settings,” says Johanne McCarthy, the new Indigenous health lead at St. Joe’s. “It’s about restoring safety for Indigenous patients accessing care.”  

McCarthy says she has found the right place to do her best work. “It just felt like a really good fit to be here.” 

As a naturopathic doctor who is from the Onondaga Nation of the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, “this job for me is very personal and purposeful, and I really see that it’s about creating space where Indigenous patients feel safe, respected and connected to their care,” she explains. 

“It’s a care that reflects who we are, because a lot of that care was historically marginalized from hospital settings in North America through colonization,” McCarthy says. “A lot of our ceremonies and our medicines were illegal until just very recently.”  

St. Joe’s having a dedicated Indigenous health team “will help restore and rebuild the trust so that people feel more secure coming and accessing care,” she says, adding that too many Indigenous people avoid getting care due to lack of trust and can end up with severe conditions. Having a dedicated team will help ensure that caregiving is culturally safe, and trauma informed, and ultimately, I’m hoping that it will improve patient experiences and outcomes.”  

Part of the team includes several peer support workers who “bring lived experience, cultural knowledge and relational care to the patients here. They support the patients by listening and they encourage and empower patients throughout their care. They’re walking with their peers through the system and helping them to navigate the stuff that people are unfamiliar with when they come to the hospital,” McCarthy explains. “They are that extra kind person for support. Their presence really builds trust and reduces any fear of isolation in the clinical setting.”

“A core part of decolonizing care is to have people with lived experience offering support,” she adds.  

Riley Kennedy, who is also a social worker and from the Oneida Nation of the Thames, is one of the two peer support workers on the team currently and began working in February, while the other support worker began in May.  

“Peer support provides practical and emotional support to individuals working from a frame of lived experience of mental health and addiction, so we’re able to relate to people on a less clinical level,” explains Kennedy, adding they do one-on-one and group support and are working on offering a drop-in support group. 

“Now we’re both developing the program together to turn it into something that can really address the unique needs of Indigenous peers within the hospital,” he says. 

The peer support workers are based in patient and family collaborative support services, working with patients in the mental health and addiction program, as well as other areas of the hospital as needed.  

“We can go with people to their appointments if they need that or help to provide them with problem solving or goal setting around accessing care,” he says, or just go for a walk on the beautiful hospital grounds, in addition to “working with spiritual care to provide access to smudging, traditional medicine and cultural supports.”  

Indigenous cultures see holistic care as the interconnectedness of the spiritual, physical, mental and emotional parts of a person. “Being able to access traditional medicine and smudging can be really calming for Indigenous people and have positive effects on their overall wellness, including physical and mental wellness,” he says, and the peer support workers can connect with patients through this care. “We just connect person to person and spirit to spirit.” 

Patients have been enthusiastic about the addition of peer support workers, Kennedy says. “People don’t care that we’re peer support providers or whatever our title is in the hospital. They just care that there’s someone there who’s also Indigenous… to walk with them through what can often be scary and stigmatizing.” 

St. Joe’s is committed to shaping a future where Indigenous peoples don’t feel that fear or stigma when accessing care. As the new department of Indigenous Health and Reconciliation leads the expansion of Indigenous care and opportunities for learning, it will strengthen the foundation for wellness and relational health.