Complex Care for Kids Ontario

Complex Care for Kids Ontario (CCKO) is a provincial program led by the Provincial Council for Maternal and Child Health (PCMCH) to improve care continuity, collaboration, and service delivery in keeping with the needs and requirements of children/youth with medical complexity (CMC) and their families. The program aims to provide integrated and coordinated care across health and social support services and strengthening community services, which improves access and enables care closer to home.

CCKO operates with a ‘hub-and-spoke’ model where the “hubs” serve as the regional lead sites and “spokes” are the community-based clinics. The regional lead sites are responsible for running paediatric ambulatory complex care clinics in tertiary hospitals, and capacity building in the community through developing and sustaining community-based complex care clinics in Ontario. There are four CCKO regional lead sites across the province, at:

• Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario – Ottawa Children’s Treatment Centre
• Children’s Hospital at London Health Sciences Centre
• McMaster Children’s Hospital – Hamilton Health Sciences
• The Hospital for Sick Children

There is an integrated and coordinated care plan developed for each child/youth enrolled in the Complex Care Program and a key clinical and system worker who coordinates the connections between regional lead sites and community-based clinics.