Letters about OHIP funding for outpatient psychotherapy

Here is a preview of their content…

…our deep concern over a proposal being considered by the Ministry of Health and Ontario Medical Association (OMA) Appropriateness Working Group (AWG) to limit full OHIP funding for outpatient psychotherapy to 24 hours per year.

For many patients, psychotherapy is medically necessary. Treatment decisions must be left up to a person’s primary care provider and care team, particularly when providing medical care to a person diagnosed with a mental illness, whose recovery journey is not one-size-fit-all.

Reducing outpatient psychotherapy to 24 hours per year is at-best arbitrary and fails to recognize that people with serious mental illness, and particularly Eating Disorders, may have disease trajectories (we know from research) that are difficult to predict.

Here are the letters

Read letter to Hon Christine Elliot, Deputy Premier and Minister of Health and Long-Term Care

Read letter to Hon. Michael A. Tibollo, Associate Minister of mental Health and Addictions

Read letter to Dr. Joshua Tepper, Appropriateness Working Group C0-Chair, OMA

Read letter to Dr. Paul Tenenbein, Appropriateness Working Group Co-Chair, OMA

NIED’s Wendy Preskow to be the next Lived Experience Conversation Series guest speaker.

On January 30, 2020, NIED founder and president, Wendy Preskow, will give her lived experience insights on the topic:

Family Life and Living with an Eating Disorder: One Caregiver’s Journey from Awareness to Action.

Wendy will be in conversation with Dr. Linda Booij, associate professor in the Department of Psychology and Concordia University Research Chair in Eating Disorders. Dr. Booij is also co-director of the Centre for Clinical Research in Health (CCRH), who host the Lived Experience Conversation Series.

The event will be sponsored by the Health Initiative at Concordia University and held at the University’s Loyola Chapel.  

Full details can be found here

National Initiative for Eating Disorders (NIED) announces Canada’s first Strategy dedicated to improving outcomes related to Eating Disorders

(November 7, 2019 – Toronto, Ontario) – NIED joins three national not-for-profits in releasing Canada’s first strategy aimed at improving outcomes for people affected by Eating Disorders (EDs) over the next 10 years.

Following the publication of a report entitled^[1] Eating Disorders among Girls and Women in Canada by the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women on November 17, 2014, four national organizations dedicated to supporting care for and recovery from Eating Disorders came together in 2015 to discuss how to meaningfully improve outcomes for people living with EDs in Canada.

The Canadian Eating Disorders Strategy: 2019-2029 is the result of extensive work and listening carefully to stakeholders across Canada in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019, through direct conversations and surveys targeted at the general public, professionals, caregivers and people with lived experience.

The Strategy contains 50 recommendations under six pillars of activity: 1) Prevention; 2) Public Education and Awareness; 3) Treatment; 4) Caregiver Support; 5) Training; and 6) Research.

Wendy Preskow, President of NIED, remarked, “When we started this journey seven years ago as a national not-for-profit, we could never imagined stakeholders from across Canada coming together to provide insights about what has worked well for them or their loved ones; what challenges they experienced in trying to access evidence-based and evidence-informed care; and what different stakeholders need to do to improve outcomes for people at-risk and people recovering from an Eating Disorder or related mental illness.  We are extremely grateful for the input we have received to this Strategy, from hundreds of stakeholders over the last five years”.

Download Press Release

To read the Strategy in English and French, click here