Mental Health and Addictions Centre of Excellence

The Mental Health and Addictions Centre of Excellence oversees the delivery and quality of mental health and addictions services and supports. 

Every year, more than one million people in Ontario experience a mental health or addictions challenge requiring care. Often, supports are difficult to find where and when they are needed.

Unlike other parts of the health system, mental health and addictions has historically lacked a provincial coordinating body overseeing quality and delivery. This has contributed to many challenges, such as:

• inconsistency in what services are available by region
• uneven client and family experiences and outcomes
• lack of data to show where to improve

The Centre of Excellence is addressing these challenges.

Our Role

The Centre of Excellence is responsible for:

• Managing the mental health and addictions care system
• Supporting quality improvement
• Disseminating evidence
• Setting service expectations

We are working to ensure that mental health and addictions services are:

• Delivered consistently across the province
• Integrated with the broader health care system
• Easily accessible
• Responsive to the diverse needs of people living in Ontario and their families

To do this, we will:

• establish a central point of accountability and oversight for mental health and addictions care
• create common performance indicators and shared infrastructure to disseminate evidence and set service expectations
• standardize and monitor the quality and delivery of evidence-based services and clinical care across the province
• provide support and resources to Ontario Health Teams as they connect people to the different types of mental health and addictions care they need

Our Partners

We work with several partners to guide our work, including First Nations, Inuit, Métis, and urban Indigenous (FNIMUI) partners, mental health and addictions organizations, people with lived experience, and health care providers and administrators.

Provincial Programs and Initiatives

We are also helping to implement the Roadmap to Wellness, the province’s plan to build a comprehensive and connected mental health and addictions system.

Creating provincial programs for more connected care

We are developing new provincial programs in the following priority clinical areas:

• Depression and anxiety-related disorders
• Eating disorders
• Schizophrenia and psychosis
• Substance use disorders

To manage the performance of these clinical programs and enable comprehensive and connected care we are:

• establishing a model for provincial coordinated access
• engaging with stakeholders, including people with lived experience
• standardizing data collection
• enabling system planning and performance management

The Mental Health and Addictions Centre of Excellence has committed to working collaboratively with First Nations, Inuit, Métis, and urban Indigenous partners and communities to improve access to, and availability of, culturally safe and grounded mental health and addictions services and interventions that are responsive to the unique needs of Indigenous populations. We work in partnership with other teams across Ontario Health to implement the First Nations, Inuit, Métis, and Urban Indigenous Health Framework.