Co-designing care: How community voices are shaping health-care delivery

December 11, 2025.

Community members are not just advisors to the Frontenac, Lennox & Addington Ontario Health Team (FLA OHT)—they are co-designers. Their insights, lived experience, and perspectives help shape how the FLA OHT understands care, measures success, and builds more accessible, person-centred Health Homes for everyone in the region.

A recent example of this work is the development of the new Patient Experience Survey, launching in 2026. The survey will give people across the region a chance to share how they experience their care: how easy it is to access services, how supported they feel in managing their health, and how satisfied they are with their Health Home. The responses, which will be anonymous, will guide primary care teams as they work to improve care and better meet local needs.

This survey is one of the ways the FLA OHT is supporting its long-term goal: ensuring every person in the region is connected to a primary care team. To build a strong, coordinated system of Health Homes, the FLA OHT needs to understand what is working well and where there are gaps.

“We need to evaluate what’s working from a patient perspective,” explains Connor Kemp, the FLA OHT’s Population Health and Performance Lead. “If we’re going to expand teams and create new Health Homes, we won’t know what works unless we measure it.” Suzanne Pashley, the FLA OHT’s Data Analyst, adds that the survey is closely tied to the OHT’s broader vision, “It really aligns with person-centred care by allowing patients to directly provide feedback that informs [health-care system] improvements.”

Why community engagement matters

Before finalizing the survey questions, the FLA OHT’s Quality & Evaluation Support Structure (QUEST) brought a draft to the Community Council—a group of volunteer members from across the region who bring lived and living experience to help design and improve local health and wellness services. The goal was simple: ensure the survey felt relevant, clear, and meaningful to the people who would eventually be receiving it.

For Connor, this step was essential, “It highlighted how important it is that our community feels the questions are relevant to their experience accessing care.” Council members reviewed each question—reflecting on language, clarity, cultural relevance, and whether the question would meaningfully improve care. Their feedback led to several important changes, including clearer wording, the removal of questions that felt unnecessary or insensitive, and the addition of options that better captured the realities of how people access care.

Suzanne recalls a moment when a member suggested expanding a question about support systems. “Someone said it should include help from relatives, friends, or neighbours. It was such an appropriate option, and it wasn’t there. We added it right away.” This is the essence of co-design: community members shaping tools and decisions in ways that directly impact how health care is delivered.

A shift in how the FLA OHT works

The feedback process also helped the FLA OHT consider how to further strengthen and formalize its approach to community engagement. While Community Council has long played an important role in co-design across many areas of the OHT’s work, this experience highlighted opportunities to embed that collaboration even more intentionally. 

“We’re looking at how we can embed co-design with Community Council directly in QUEST’s Terms of Reference,” explains Connor. “This will create a framework where community perspectives are included from the outset, further supporting co-design in all of our ongoing work.” Suzanne agrees and has already seen this shift in action. “There have been several moments where something new comes up and someone says, ‘That would be a great opportunity to bring to Community Council.’ This experience really showcased how useful co-design is.”

What this means for care in our region

By shaping a survey that is concise, meaningful, and grounded in real experiences, Community Council members have helped create a tool that will guide improvement work across all Health Homes. Their contribution ensures that teams will have timely, relevant information to understand people’s challenges, experiences, and needs. This standardized approach will help teams more quickly and effectively take action. “It removes the overhead so teams can focus on quality improvement—not data collection and analysis,” underscores Connor. “They’ll be able to see results in real time and act on them.”

Over time, this survey will help identify where people are facing challenges accessing care, whether their overall health and wellness is improving, and whether specific groups—such as Francophone, Indigenous, or newcomer communities—are facing barriers that need targeted solutions. This data will not only help individual teams understand their patients better; it will help the region work together as a learning community, sharing what works and improving care collectively.

Community Council perspective

For Community Council Chair Brenda Luffman, co-design is at the heart of why she volunteers with the FLA OHT. She describes co-design as a process where community members help shape a project while it is being built—not after the decisions have already been made. “Co-design means that community members are engaged as true co-designers,” she explains. “The earlier community members are included in planning and developing, the better the outcome will be in meeting community needs.”

When Brenda and other Council members reviewed the draft Patient Experience Survey, the group looked closely at each question to see whether it was clear, meaningful, and necessary. She says the collaborative nature of the process stood out most. “We each reviewed the questions from our own lens, then discussed them as a group,” she recalls. “Our input led to fewer questions overall, removing ones that weren’t relevant, rewriting others, and identifying where more information was needed.” She adds that seeing an Impact Report afterward—showing exactly how their feedback changed the final survey—made the process especially meaningful.

For Brenda, knowing that the Council’s contributions will help shape how patient experience will be measured across the region is deeply rewarding. “This is the reason most of us are members of the Community Council,” she says. “We want to be part of co-design opportunities that create initiatives that are better designed and truly relevant to our community.” She hopes this meaningful involvement will encourage more people to complete the survey when it launches.

Building a system shaped by the people it serves

The Patient Experience Survey is just one example of how community involvement strengthens the work of the FLA OHT. Thanks to the Community Council, the voices of people across Frontenac, Lennox & Addington are actively shaping the future of care in our region.