When healthy food and other basics are out of reach
By Louise Kinross
Jessica Reid is a social worker and team lead for Holland Bloorview’s Family Navigation Hub. “We provide short-term support to connect families to resources in the community that can support their social determinants of health—housing, childcare, respite care, transportation and food security,” Jessica says. While the field of social medicine is developing in some adult hospitals, Jessica says it’s in its infancy in pediatric rehab. We spoke about her work.
BLOOM: Why was there a need for the Family Navigation Hub?
Jessica Reid: People who have stable housing, food, and transportation to get to their medical appointments do better. We know a family’s experience and outcome with the therapy and medical support their child gets here is going to be drastically different if they’re well supported and feel safe; if they have a place to live; food on the table; and they’re not worried about how they’re going to get here by crossing the city on five buses.
We were working on a social-needs screening tool for families before the pandemic, but the pandemic really sped this work up. It brought to the forefront that people were struggling, losing jobs, and not being able to afford rent. Social needs were more talked about in the news. These are everyday necessities that impact our ability to live our lives.
BLOOM: Who uses the social-needs screening tool in our hospital?
Jessica Reid: We started with programs that don’t have social workers, like therapeutic recreation and life skills and infant development. Our data shows about 60 per cent of clients screened across the hospital have one or more social need. Child and respite care are two common ones. Not all childcares can support a child with a disability—or want to.
Housing and food are the most challenging needs to address. That’s because they’re income related, and we have very little influence on increasing family income security.
Even when our families are housed, they have a lot of accessibility challenges. If they’re renting, they can’t make renovations to accommodate equipment for a child with a physical disability. Or you may have a five-person family living in a one-bedroom apartment. Or families with kids with autism face complaints that their children are making too much noise.
It's very difficult for families to afford basic living costs. Families with a child with a disability have extra expenses related to care and equipment, and often one parent can’t work. They’re often reliant on disability funding and social assistance, which are underfunded.
To try to bring resources to more people, we run CommunityCONNECT sessions for parents once a month. These are workshops where we bring in an expert service provider to do a presentation about things like housing, respite, or financial literacy. We often get 40 to 50 people attending.
BLOOM: I know the community kitchen series is in high demand?
Jessica Reid: It’s one of the most meaningful programs for me. We’ve had an extended partnership with FoodShare Toronto where we offer a five-week program for about 20 to 25 families who receive ingredients for meals. Then they cook a meal together over Zoom.
We see families supporting and encouraging each other and making connections. They have the commonality of having a child with a disability. They can talk about the challenges of being able to afford things, about the cultural impacts of food and race, or about having a kid that is a picky eater.
FoodShare is a food justice organization, so they talk about how food is a right. It’s not a food charity model like a food bank.
BLOOM: How does your hub involve students?
Jessica Reid: We’re operating as a student-led environment. We have two master’s social work students from the University of Toronto who do placements here from September to June. They meet with families and help them navigate to resources. Last September, with INSPIRE grant funding, we were able to hire a part-time social worker. We've also benefited from Making Kids Count funding.
What’s exciting is that a lot of our social-needs work is part of the hospital’s strategic plan now. I hope this will help us think about how we embed this into the work we do across the organization. We all need to think about how we can shape our service models and practices differently based on the data we’re getting through social-needs screening.
BLOOM: What are the greatest challenges of your role?
Jessica Reid: Supporting families with systems that are broken. Frustration when you’re working within systems that aren’t set up for the people they serve, and they’re overburdened. Inflation. The instability of funding models to support community work in the areas we’d like to partner with groups in. Sometimes you feel a bit helpless.
We need to find creative ways to address some of the challenges. Sometimes that’s just listening to families’ struggles—being that listening ear—so they know they’re not alone and feel like we care about them as a family unit.
BLOOM: What are the greatest joys?
Jessica Reid: I love seeing the resiliency that families have. I get a lot of joy out of supporting them in any way. It may be giving the family a gift during the holidays. You don’t know how far that can go for some families. Or connecting parents with a workshop and seeing the joy on their faces as they build community with like-minded people.
BLOOM: How did you get into this field?
Jessica Reid: I did a lot of work when I was a teenager and in university at summer camps for children from at-risk communities. I went to overnight camp as a kid, and I thought it was a really important way to be an individual away from your family and learn different skills. When I was doing my master’s in social work I got a placement at Geneva Centre in the Bridge to Geneva project. My supervisor was at Bloorview and I was here two days a week.
That was my biggest exposure to working in the disability community. I provided resources to parents of kids with autism, and I liked seeing all the kids and watching the progress that families can make despite the challenges. Later I got a job in one of our satellite autism diagnostic clinics as an intake coordinator and eventually assumed a social work role. For many years I worked on contract in our autism program and in other programs—including our spina bifida program, concussion clinic and neuromotor program.
BLOOM: How do you manage stress?
Jessica Reid: Being able to share challenges with like-minded colleagues on a daily basis and debrief is one of the biggest ways. I also enjoy activities with my family and loved ones. My daughter plays hockey, so I like being a hockey mom.
Acknowledging that systems, not individuals, fail people, helps relieve moral distress for clinicians like me.
BLOOM: If you could change one thing about how we meet families’ social needs, what would it be?
Jessica Reid: One of my biggest goals for us as an organization is to be able to advocate and support our clients in these areas. We have a strong voice in the disability community as experts in pediatric rehab. How can we lend our voice to social causes that are impacting our clients at higher rates than the general public? I’m remembering the work that former social worker Barb Germon did with Habitat for Humanity. I feel we could be doing more of this work.
In photo below is social worker Jessica Reid (centre) with master's social work students Denise Silva (left) and Emily Abergel (right). Like this content? Sign up for our monthly BLOOM e-letter, follow @LouiseKinross on Twitter, or watch our A Family Like Mine video series.
