Windsor-Essex OHT: A Coordinated Access Network for the Hardest-to-Reach

When the Windsor-Essex Ontario Health Team (WEOHT) was approved in February 2022 — Ontario's 51st OHT — its co-chairs were unusually specific about who it would serve first: the region's temporary foreign worker community, people living in shelters and high-risk settings, and residents managing mental health, substance use, and advancing chronic conditions. Today the WEOHT spans more than forty organizations serving over 450,000 residents, and that founding focus on the hardest-to-reach has matured into concrete infrastructure.

A Coordinated Access and Attachment Network

In April 2026, the province invested $2.15 million in a partnership between the Windsor-Essex Community Health Centre, the Canadian Mental Health Association Windsor-Essex, and the Essex County Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinic to establish a Coordinated Access and Attachment Network — a mobile, flexible, community-based model targeting downtown Windsor's priority neighbourhoods, where poverty, housing instability, and food insecurity stack on top of primary care barriers. The design is dual-track: reach unattached residents who never registered with Health Care Connect through outreach and navigation, while drawing down the existing waitlist with the WEOHT and its Primary Care Network. Crucially, people can access care before formal attachment — building trust first. The partners' target: roughly 6,200 people attached by May 31, 2027.

Built on a mobile foundation

This extends earlier work: a $1.98-million investment through CMHA Windsor-Essex expanded the Mobile Medical Support team — a mobile clinic delivering episodic primary care, preventive care, and wraparound services to vulnerable and underserved populations across the county — with capacity to serve nearly 8,000 additional residents. And the OHT keeps patients in the design loop: its Patient/Client, Family, and Caregiver Advisory Council convened 83 patients, caregivers, and system partners at its Together Toward Tomorrow visioning conference in September 2025.

What 'access before attachment' needs

Windsor-Essex is testing an idea the rest of the province should watch: open the door first, formalize the roster second. Operationally, that requires a booking front door with no hard gates — patients with or without a health card, in the languages of Essex County's agricultural workforce, bookable by an outreach worker on a phone in a parking lot. That is precisely the 'every patient books' design philosophy Empower builds to, and it's why we think the WEOHT's model, done well, converts outreach into lasting attachment rather than one-time encounters.

Sources & further reading

• windsoriteDOTca — $2.15M Coordinated Access and Attachment Network
• AM800 — three organizations, 6,200 attachments by May 2027
• CMHA Windsor-Essex — Mobile Medical Support expansion
• County of Essex — WEOHT approval & founding focus
• Windsor-Essex OHT — partners & PFAC visioning conference