Editor’s Note: On March 30, 2019 Dr. George Berrigan officially retired from St. John’s Clinic after serving 10 years. The Mayors’ Dinner was a wonderful opportunity to thank George Berrigan and Evelyn Gurney for their commitment. The following is George’s Mayors’ Dinner speech
In March, 2009, the Psychiatric Outreach Project (POP) based at the St. John’s Kitchen expanded its medical services beyond psychiatric care to include family medicine care. Dr. Neil Arya had been providing weekly clinics for people who had psychiatric and addiction problems. When Evelyn Gurney, RN, and I joined the program we were able to provide two full day clinics at St. John’s Kitchen and half day clinics at House of Friendship and a half day clinic at Emmanuel United Church on Bridgeport Road in Waterloo. Fortunately, Dr. Rebecca Lubitz (a family doctor) joined our team two years ago working one day a week at St John Kitchen. Adding family medicine to the POP program expanded services to people who are homeless or at high risk of becoming homeless.
The Integrated Circle of Care is a fluid and collaborative approach followed by workers from different agencies weaving through St. John’s Kitchen. Within this approach, staff members from each agency are aware of their specific personal roles. However, the high level of collaboration between workers means that people can approach any worker, without knowing their agency association or specific role, and still receive support – either that worker will support the person directly, or they will introduce the person to another worker who can support the person more appropriately.
This approach makes relationships more natural and support more accessible. Workers from different agencies are easily approachable, meaning that people build relationships with multiple workers. Having relationships with different workers is important to a person’s support – it makes support from a trusted source easy to find, and means that people have a choice of worker to approach in any given situation.
In order to maintain a circle of care around a person, workers from different agencies ask for consent from the person for information to be shared between workers. Continuous communication between workers helps to ensure that people do not fall into gaps between services, and also that services are not duplicated.
