Financial Constraints Affecting Thames Valley’s Leading Community-Based Mental Health and Addiction Care Provider

Jul 4, 2024

Canadian Mental Health Association Thames Valley Addiction and Mental Health Services (CMHA TVAMHS) is sharing that we are facing significant financial constraints in our 2024-2025 fiscal year. This follows our previous fiscal year, which wrapped up on March 31, 2024, and recorded a $2.6 million deficit on total revenues of $52.5M. This is the first time in our agency’s history (and in the history of all legacy organizations pre-integration) that a deficit has been recorded. This deficit signals the intense under-funding of the community-based mental health and addiction sector.

Community-based care is often paid up to 30% less than other healthcare settings. In a recent compensation study, results showed that the community health sector was behind more than $2 billion in wages, compared to individuals doing similar work in other areas of healthcare. As an agency, we strive to ensure our staff receive fair compensation for the work they do – which is growing in demand and complexity.

In 2023, the community-based mental health and addiction sector, including our organization, received a 5% increase in Ontario Health base funding – the first significant increase in a decade. This resulted in an increase to our annual base funding of $1.6M, bringing our total operating expense run rate to $55.1M.

While we appreciate this boost and the government’s recent commitment to supportive housing and additional targeted investments to maintain existing mental health and addictions programs, the lack of base budget increase fails to acknowledge the health human resources crisis our sector faces. With 86% of our budget supporting salaries and benefits, the current provisions mean maintaining our services will become more difficult over time.

As a result of the financial constraints affecting our agency, we have had to make difficult decisions resulting in a number of roles being dissolved and some areas of services being reconstructed. Our People Services team has worked tirelessly to offer all affected employees other opportunities within the agency through existing vacant roles.

While our current restructuring has had only a minimal impact on service provision, this is not the case for our future. The demand for community-based mental health and addiction care continues to grow placing pressure on our agency and clinical teams. Meeting the needs of our community with financial constraints will be increasingly difficult and we are sounding the alarm now.

Our financial constraints cannot be rectified through staffing changes alone. Our team continues to work with funders and partners to advocate for additional funding. We welcome the support of all to help us achieve our goal of securing permanent, adequate funding that will allow our agency and others in the community-based health care sector to overcome this health human resources crisis.

The risk of not achieving security in our base funding is too great to overlook – without stability in community-based care, our society will continue to face service cuts, longer wait times, increased overcrowding in emergency departments and hospitals, and a worsening opioid crisis.

We will continue to advocate for the funding of community-based mental health and addiction care, and we invite you to do the same. You can advocate by reaching out to your local MPP or other government officials. Together, we can ensure the stability of community-based care.

For more information, contact our Communications Team at communications@cmhatv.ca