Dorothy Quon works at the meeting point of two care environments. As Vice President at WoodGreen Community Services and Director of Integrated Care at Michael Garron Hospital, she connects hospital programs with community services. One helps people return home, while the other helps them remain there. She has previously spent more than a decade serving vulnerable populations in Michael Garron Hospital’s Emergency Department.
Bridging Hospital and Community Care
Hospital care is often concentrated on helping a person become well enough to return home. Community care is more longitudinal, focused on enabling that person to remain safe and stable there.
Although those objectives align, Quon has found that the sectors can be siloed. Working within both allows her to understand their pressures and bring teams together around natural opportunities for partnership.
The mandate of both roles, Quon notes, is to build stronger connections and smoother transitions between hospital and community, keeping individuals and their needs at the centre of the support.
At WoodGreen, the Community Care Unit provides personal support services, mental health care, social work, counselling and permanent housing for people who were previously unhoused. Its seniors’ programs include active living centres, Meals on Wheels and transportation. Quon works with directors and teams to run these programs efficiently while identifying opportunities for improvement and growth.
The mandate of both the roles in community and integrated care is to build stronger connections and smoother transitions between hospital and community, keeping individuals and their needs at the centre of the support.
At Michael Garron Hospital, she helps design programs that connect the hospital more closely with the community. Her portfolio includes hospital-to-home services, a home-care pilot and the hospital’s first primary care navigation clinic. The clinic connects people without a primary care provider to primary care and other supports that can help them remain in the community.
Drawing on her oversight of programs across both organizations, Quon brought teams from WoodGreen and Michael Garron Hospital together to design and launch a memory care cluster. The enhanced assisted-living program built by her teams supports people with memory and behavioural needs who are waiting for specialized long-term care. Its secure, home-like environment has helped stabilize behaviours and move some individuals more quickly into lower-support community settings.
Quon applied the same partnership-building approach beyond seniors, helping develop a youth outreach team that connects community social workers with hospital psychiatrists. Her team built the programs in collaboration with her hospital counterparts. They helped align these professionals around individualized care plans for young people facing difficult transitions from hospital to community as they enter adulthood. The coordinated support during this handoff helps them remain out of the hospital.
Designing Care around the Whole Person
Quon’s experience supporting seniors with complex needs has reinforced a belief that lasting health and independence require care that extends beyond physical needs. Housing stability affects their daily routines and medication adherence, while food insecurity can undermine chronic-disease management. Social and psychological supports also shape their ability to live independently. Each factor has a knock-on effect on the others.
This wider lens is becoming more important as Toronto’s living and housing costs rise. Quon sees a widening gap between incomes and basic needs, forcing some people to make difficult choices among healthcare, food and medication. Smaller families, fewer informal caregivers and reduced social networks further weaken the safety nets on which many people rely.
These pressures make fragmented service navigation especially difficult for people managing multiple health concerns. Quon believes integrated models should provide a single point of connection, guiding individuals to the healthcare and community services they need without requiring them to navigate each system separately. The objective is sustained health and independence, not simply access to an individual service.
Achieving that integration depends on relationships. Because hospital and community teams may interact only across narrow areas of their work, Quon advises leaders to begin by identifying natural points of alignment. Small, practical wins build trust, mutual understanding and the foundation required to undertake more difficult work together.
As pressures on community care intensify, Quon remains focused on partnerships and programs that respond to the realities surrounding each person. Bringing institutional care closer to housing, social services and everyday community support makes care easier to navigate and more capable of keeping people healthy at home. For Quon, integrated care succeeds when every service connects around the person it is meant to support.
