The Local Health Integration Networks spend a lot of time talking about community engagement.
In his 2010 report The LHIN Spin, the Ontario Ombudsman stated “the reality of community decision-making has fallen far short of the political spin.”
Andre Marin writes: “there are no clear minimum standards for soliciting community views on systematic priorities or specific integration plans, and different LHINs interpret their public outreach obligations differently.”
Marin picked up on the common complaint that while the LHINs regularly take steps to obtain local stakeholder views on the general state of the health care system, the performance has been less than adequate when it comes to changes that “have direct immediate impact on the lives of local residents.”
Following that 2010 report, the province issued a toolkit in the following year that proposed guidelines on LHIN community engagement.
OPSEU Diablogue 