OHC’s Annual Report highlighting our work for the past year is now live! Please take a look to see what we’ve been up to and where we’re headed. As always, we welcome community feedback. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!
OHC is pleased to have the opportunity to highlight another year of healthcare, education, and support for the workers of Manitoba.
The challenges we’ve faced over the past months are both unique and universal – the pandemic that we are all living through may be unprecedented in modern times but it has shown us all too clearly where our deficits are as a society in ensuring safety, security, and well-being for all our members. As a worker-centered community health centre, OHC is working to address these challenges.
Our psychological health and safety work continues to evolve. As the pandemic has highlighted many of the mental health struggles facing workers, OHC has developed and delivered several trainings on addressing and improving psychological safety in the workplace, including considerations for a return to the office. In addition, our Creating a Culture of Consent in the workplace training is going strong and, in partnership with fellow community health centres, OHC will be launching a public awareness campaign this fall.
This past fall, OHC completed another round of Train-the-Trainer sessions with participants from the Afghan, Congolese, and Eritrean communities. These leaders will take health and safety lessons back and support capacity building among workers in their own communities.
OHC has also been working within our leadership to move the needle on issues of equity within the organization. An Anti-Racism Working Group, made up of board, management, and staff, has been looking at how we can live up to our values and ensure that we are meeting both the expectations as well as the needs of our communities. It was clear we had more work to do, and the Working Group developed a position paper to outline a way forward. This position paper places OHC in context within the Labour movement as well as healthcare, and gives recommendations – developed with input from community partners – for where to begin to ensure we are pushing forward on matters of equity on both an organizational level as well as a systemic level. Our first task is an internal Equity Audit, which we will undertake this summer, to identify and remedy practices of organizational racism. From there, we will move on the remainder of the recommendations based on an action plan to address and improve any issues identified by the audit. As a health centre that places workers at the centre of everything we do, it is not only our obligation but our opportunity to complete this work with integrity, to fully embody our values, and ensure we are meeting the needs of all workers where they are at.
OHC’s leadership wishes to extend acknowledgment and gratitude to staff who work so diligently to promote the highest standard of health and safety; to our Trainers, who are so dedicated to OHC’s mission and carry that work in community; and to our board of directors who steward the organization in a responsible, sustainable way. We also wish to thank our funders and supporters without whom this work wouldn’t be possible. A particular thank you to the family and friends of Rob Hilliard, who so generously remembered OHC upon Rob’s passing last year. Rob was the Chair of OHC from 1995 to 2005 and was remembered as a fierce advocate for Manitoba workers. OHC will continue that legacy and do our very best to advocate for the rights of all workers to come home safely at the end of the day.
In solidarity,
Kevin Rebeck
Chair, OHC Board of Directors
Carly Nicholson
Executive Director,
Occupational Health Centre
Read the full report here: