Best Practice Spotlight Organization (BPSO) Ontario Health Team (OHT)
East Toronto Health Partners (ETHP) is proud to be one of the first Best Practice Spotlight Organization (BPSO) Ontario Health Teams (OHTs).
In October 2019, ETHP partnered with the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario (RNAO) to embark on a four-year partnership journey to optimize patient outcomes through evidence-based practice and robust staff engagement across multiple ETHP member organizations. This partnership comes to life with the implementation of Best Practice Guidelines, which provide evidence-based recommendations and implementation tips pertaining to infrastructure, knowledge exchange, capacity building, dissemination, evaluation and reporting.
ETHP has committed to implementing four guidelines over four years, leading to the BPSO OHT designation upon completion. ETHP expects to achieve this designation in June 2024.
Since 2019, ETHP has released the following guidelines:
- Person and Family-Centred Care – launched in 2020
- Preventing Falls and Reducing Injury from Falls – launched in 2021
- Transitions in Care and Services – updated guideline released in 2023
Development of these guidelines relies on the contributions of ETHP members, who help document gaps and opportunities and select quality improvement initiatives and measurement plans that cross organizational boundaries.
To supplement our guidelines on person and family-centred care, ETHP developed an eLearning module to help partners learn more about person and family-centred care and how to put their skills into action in every day work. Review the resources on person and family-centred care.
To aid in the development of our guidelines on preventing falls and reducing injury from falls, ETHP member organizations hosted a virtual peer networking group to support graduate students with interprofessional learning and professional development opportunities. This group worked on policy and practice reviews across our member organizations to inform our improvement priorities for preventing falls and reducing injuries from falls.
Many ETHP member organizations have initiatives in place around falls prevention. With the implementation of our guidelines on preventing falls and reducing injury from falls, we’re building on the incredible foundations across our organizations, while strengthening supports across sectors and incorporating new opportunities to provide the best evidence-based care to all those who we serve. Most recently, we launched a falls prevention toolkit to help inform organizational fall prevention programs across our OHT partner organizations. The toolkit also contains a series of image and text-based handouts to help people prevent and respond to falls at home. Review the ETHP Falls Prevention Toolkit or check out the handouts:
- Falls prevention patient/client handout (text based)
- Falls prevention patient/client infographic cut-outs (image based)
ETHP is eager to apply recommendations on transitions in care as our next focus area as a BPSO OHT. As an integrated system of care, OHTs are ideally situated to work on improving transitions for patients, clients and families.
As a BPSO OHT, ETHP is proud to partner with RNAO to build on their foundation of excellence at our partner organizations. We look forward to the work ahead.
Learn more about our success as a Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario Best Practice Spotlight Organization Ontario Health Team designation program.
