Who Owns the Work? We All Do. We Are All the OHT.

A guest blog post by Angela Martin, Practice Facilitator and Digital Health Lead

Collaboration starts when we stop asking, “Whose responsibility is this?” and start asking, “What role can I play?”

Recently, through my work with the Great River Ontario Health Team, I had the opportunity to speak at the GR OHT Collaboration Council Meeting. This in-person gathering focused on strengthening integration, building connections and exploring what we can do differently, together, for the communities we serve.

The question I spoke about sits at the heart of not only my work with the Great River OHT, but, I believe, OHT collaboration more broadly: Who owns the work?

The answer seems simple: We all do. But shared ownership asks something more of us. It asks us to remember why we came together in the first place, to invest in the trust and relationships that make collaboration possible, and to recognize that none of us can build the health care system our communities need on our own.

Always remember the why

So often, we get caught up in projects, priorities, meetings, deliverables, organizational responsibilities and the competing demands on our time. It’s easy to lose sight of why we are doing this work in the first place. Behind every process we improve, every barrier we remove and every partnership we build is a person trying to get the care they need, when and where they need it.

That is our why: every person who needs care today, and every generation that will depend on what we build tomorrow.

When things get complicated, priorities compete, or we find ourselves asking “who owns what?”, this is what should bring us back together. Are we making things better for the people we serve? Are the decisions we make today helping to create a sustainable health care system that will be there for our children, our grandchildren and future generations?

Trust and relationships matter

My work with the Great River OHT continues to reinforce that shared purpose alone isn’t enough. Integration doesn’t happen because we create another committee, structure or partnership. It happens between people, when we build trust, listen to different perspectives, have honest conversations, follow through on our commitments and work through difficult things together.

Relationships may sometimes feel like the “soft” part of health system transformation. I believe they are the foundation.

There is a reason the idea that we can only move at the speed of trust resonates so strongly. Without trust, collaboration can only go so far. When trust is strong, we can move beyond organizational boundaries and focus less on who owns a particular piece of work and more on what we are trying to accomplish together.

We are all the OHT

An OHT isn’t somewhere we send the work. It isn’t one organization, one leader, one working group or another table. It is all of us.

Shared ownership doesn’t mean everyone does everything. It means recognizing that what I bring and what you bring may be different, but we need both. Our different expertise, experiences, relationships, perspectives and resources are not barriers to collaboration. They are what make collaboration valuable.

We can’t delegate collaboration to a committee or expect it to happen because a partnership exists on paper. We have to live it through the way we show up and work together every day.

We don’t have to own every piece of the work to take ownership of its success.

Perhaps the question isn’t simply, “Whose responsibility is this?” Perhaps the better questions are: What role can I play? What can we do together that none of us could do alone? And will it make things better for the people we serve?

Ultimately, this isn’t about structures, organizations or who gets credit. It’s about creating better care today while building a sustainable health care system for tomorrow.

That takes shared purpose. It takes trust and relationships. And it takes all of us.

So, who owns the work?

We do. All of us. Because we are all the OHT.