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Cindy Dawson is the Clinical Manager of 1Call1Click.ca, an initiative of the Kids Come First Health Team, providing mental health, addiction and substance use health care for children and youth based out of CHEO. Cindy has two decades of experience working in the children and youth mental health space and shares this expertise as an N4 subject matter expert.
Prior to moving into management, Cindy gained front-line experience working with children and youth as a Certified Child and Youth Counsellor in various capacities, including in schools and in homes with the Children’s Aid Society. She reflects on this position as sparking her passion for working with children and youth, “that created my interest in trying to make sure we try to connect families, because when you’re working in the home with families you really get a sense of where their needs are, and it helps you appreciate why someone might not be doing well in school when they don’t have food or furniture at home.”
Cindy delved further into working with this population upon moving to CHEO, where she worked in various inpatient units, including the Eating Disorders Program and Centralized Mental Health Intake as an intake worker. These roles opened her eyes to the importance of a trauma-informed approach when bringing children and youth (and their families) into a hospital setting. She began to think about how a trauma-informed approach could be embedded in care delivery, in turn reducing barriers to access. Throughout her career as a front-line worker, Cindy worked with newcomer families – something that familiarized her with the importance of offering high-quality and accessible interpretation services.
In 2019, Cindy began meeting with a community working group of core mental health and substance use service providers, including youth and parent representatives with lived experience, to discuss barriers to access. This eventually led to the creation of 1Call1Click.ca. “What we do know about kids is that they are not just small adults. They have unique needs. We need to have a process that fits their needs. One of the initiatives of the Kids Come First Health Team was to create a single point of access – the idea of the single point is that it’s not the only door, there’s just no wrong door,” explains Cindy.
“The secret sauce [of the working group] was having families at the table with some diversity within that group, to really bring forth those cultural aspects and what we needed to think about when creating this program.”
Today, 1Call1Click.ca serves thousands of children and youth across the Champlain region of Eastern Ontario. While CHEO infrastructure serves as the hub for the service, 1Call1Click.ca intake workers work for community mental health, addictions and substance use agencies across the region that connect daily to support connecting children, youth and their families to the most appropriate agency for service. Centralizing the intake approach in this way has allowed for streamlined care coordination, as well as enhanced data collection on the challenges that children and youth face. It also increases efficiency by preventing families from being listed on multiple waitlists.
As part of the "no wrong door” model, 1Call1Click.ca is available for self-referral or referral by a professional/care provider. Interpretation is also embedded into the intake model from the program – when conducting a self-referral, clients can indicate if they’d like interpretation services in a language other than English or French. This ensures that intake workers include interpretation services in all points of contact going forward.
When asked what’s next for 1Call1Click.ca, Cindy says, “we have big dreams!” While planning and consultations are still underway, Cindy and her team have started collaborating with day treatment teams to launch a Multi-Disciplinary Day Treatment team in the winter of 2023, with future plans to expand intake and navigation services across Eastern Ontario.
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