Accessibility

In fulfilling our mission, St. Joseph’s Health Care London strives to provide accessible care in a manner that respects the dignity and independence of people with disabilities.

St. Joseph’s is also committed to ensuring that all patients have an equal opportunity to obtain, use, and benefit from our programs and services.

A rehabilitation caregiver helps a patient with his wheelchair.

Many initiatives are underway across the organization to ensure that our care and services are accessible to people with disabilities.

St. Joseph's strives to earn your complete confidence by providing information in various formats. Work with your care provider to determine the specific communication format you require.

If you have any additional questions or would like to provide us with feedback please contact us.

Valuable resources on accessibility at St. Joseph's

St. Joseph's will continue to update these web pages with more information about our accessibility services. In this section of our website you can find Accessibility Plans and Reports, along with resources for visitors with disabilities including:

Resources for visitors with disabilities

Assistive devices

St. Joseph’s requests patients bring with them assistive devices they use to carry out everyday activities when accessing care and services. St. Joseph’s makes reasonable efforts to ensure that patients with disabilities can use their assistive devices while in the organization. 

Assistive devices include (but are not limited to): wheelchairs, hearing aids, adaptive computer technologies, walkers, crutches, and personal sound amplification devices. An adult change table is located on the 6th floor in B Zone, B6-014 at St. Joseph's Hospital. Wheelchairs are available at most of our major hospital site entrances.

For assistance, please speak with a volunteer at the entrance or speak with security by dialing 44555 on any hospital telephone.

Directions, maps, and parking

View our location for directions to each of St. Joseph's facilities, including the location of accessible parking spaces.

Service animals

St. Joseph’s is committed to welcoming people with disabilities who are accompanied by service animals to the parts of the premises that are open to the public and other third parties. In areas where service animals are excluded by law, or if the presence of service animals may adversely affect the health and safety of others, people using service animals are asked to make arrangements for their service animals to be supervised. If the animal cannot accompany the person with the disability, staff ensures measures are available for the person to obtain, use and benefit from care and services.

Patients may wish to discuss bringing service animals to appointments with clinic coordinators when booking appointments. The clinic coordinator can provide information to the patient that may be helpful to him or her when accessing care or services.

Support persons

St. Joseph’s welcomes support persons who accompany patients with disabilities to hospital premises. Reasonable efforts will be made to ensure that people with disabilities have access to their support persons except where the safety of a person is a risk. If the support person cannot accompany the person with the disability, staff ensures measures are available for the person to obtain, use and benefit from care and services.

Telephone devices for the deaf (TDD) or teletypewriters (TTY)

This technology is available for people with profound hearing loss or poor speech recognition ability. To access telephone service to communicate with a person who will be using a TTY or Voice Carry Over (VCO) telephone, a hearing person who will be speaking calls 1-800-855-0511.  A person who will be typing on a TTY will call 1-800-267-6511.  There is no charge for local calls.

  • TTY machines are available at each main site.
  • At Parkwood Institute, an FM system and personal amplifiers are available from Audiology.
  • Telephones for patients with vision and hearing loss are available through Information Technology Services.
  • All patient telephones have volume controls.

Accessibility Plans and Reports

Ontario has laws that set standards for accessibility, under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 including the Accessibility Standards for Customer Service. Learn more about accessibility and the patient care experience:

Other documents, as required by the Customer Services Regulation, are available upon request in a number of formats.

Accessibility Plans and Status Reports

Language services and translation

St. Joseph's offers a number of resources for our patients and visitors who require assistance with language services.

Contact us to access our services

Switchboard: 519 646-6100

Language interpreters

If you would like to arrange to have an interpreter who speaks your language, please inform our staff in advance of your visit and they will make the necessary arrangements.

Alternatively, you may call our Switchboard to ask for assistance in arranging this service: 519 646-6100.
Please note that this is an English-speaking line only.

For the D/deaf, hard of hearing, and deafened

Telecommunications devices such as TTYs, Pocket Talkers, and other assistive devices are available to D/deaf, hard of hearing, and deafened patients. 

Sign Language Interpreter

If you require a Sign Language Interpreter, please inform our staff in advance of your visit and they will make the necessary arrangements, or you may have someone contact Switchboard at 519 646-6100 to make the necessary arrangements.

Services linguistiques 

St. Joseph's offre un certain nombre de ressources aux patients et aux visiteurs qui ont besoin de services linguistiques

Appelez-nous pour avoir accès à nos services.

Standard : 519 646-6100

 

Services d’interprètes

Si vous voulez qu’on retienne les services d’un interprète qui parle votre langue, informez-en notre personnel avant votre visite pour qu’on prenne les dispositions nécessaires.

De même, vous pouvez appeler notre standard et demander qu’on vous aide à obtenir ce service : 519 646-6100.
Sachez que le service de standard est offert en anglais seulement.

Matériel traduit

Nous nous faisons un devoir de vous fournir des renseignements sur la santé clairs et exacts. Nous déterminons régulièrement les documents vitaux et les renseignements essentiels affichés sur le site Web qui devraient être traduits en différentes langues selon les besoins des personnes que nous servons.

Pour les personnes malentendantes

Des appareils de télécommunication pour personnes malentendantes (ATS, amplificateurs personnels et autres accessoires fonctionnels) sont à la disposition des patients.

Interprète gestuel

Si vous avez besoin des services d’un interprète gestuel, informez-en notre personnel avant votre visite pour qu’on prenne les dispositions nécessaires. Vous pouvez aussi demander à quelqu’un d’appeler le standard au 519 646-6100 pour prendre les dispositions nécessaires.

Personnes de soutien

Les personnes de soutien sont les bienvenues à St. Joseph’s. Pour en savoir plus long (en anglais seulement)

Website accessibility

If you experience any difficulty in using St. Joseph's Health Care London's website, please contact:

Web Producer
519 646-6100 ext. 64643
WebUpdatesStJosephs@sjhc.london.on.ca

We can also provide any of the website content in an alternate format to suit your needs, please contact us.

Accessibility statement

We have undertaken to use our knowledge and understanding of the ways in which different people access the Internet, to develop a web site that is clear and simple for everybody to use.

We hope that your experience with St. Joseph's website is efficient and enjoyable.

St. Joseph's works to ensure that all users, regardless of their technical set-up or disabilities, can access the information provided on www.sjhc.london.on.ca

To achieve that goal, our web developers followed the standards established by the World Wide Web Consortium - WC3.

Our website are designed to meet and exceed the basic level of accessibility set by the W3C and required by both Federal and Provincial governments for public websites (known as WCAC 2.0 level AA).

These accessibility standards have been incorporated into the coding of these templates to ensure a greater degree of future-proofing of the site. These additional standards include key items such as using cascading style sheets to separate content from design/structure, providing an alternative print style sheet, colour and usability enhancements.

Throughout development, these templates have been checked for accessibility compliance from both an automatic and a manual checkpoint perspective to ensure that they meet known legislated and recommended standards.

Emergency response procedures

St. Joseph's is pleased to share its emergency response procedures with the public in compliance with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Integrated, Accessibility Standard. The information is also available in accessible formats upon request.

Members of the public are reminded to support requests or directions by staff or emergency services workers at St. Joseph's in the case of an emergency, such as a fire at one of our sites. All emergencies are declared through an overhead announcement system.

Emergency Codes for St. Joseph's

Learn more about emergency management and response

Emergencies are unforeseen situations that demand prompt, coordinated actions that exceed normal procedures and limit damage to person, property, and/or the environment.

Internal emergencies are emergency incidents occurring within the organization. External emergencies occur in the community but affect the organization either by interfering with operations or by creating large numbers of additional patients.

Emergency management is based on a risk management approach and consists of four core components:

  • Mitigation/prevention: actions taken to reduce or eliminate the effects of an emergency
  • Preparedness: actions taken prior to an emergency to ensure an effective response
  • Response: actions taken to respond to an emergency
  • Recovery: actions taken to recover from an emergency. 

What you need to know

St. Joseph’s has an emergency management program that addresses how the organization mitigates, prepares for, responds to, and recovers from emergencies. The following information is what you need to know about St. Joseph’s emergency response procedures:

General expectations of the public related to emergencies or disasters affecting St. Joseph’s

The general expectation is that members of the public, while on St. Joseph’s property, take instruction and conduct their own response based on staff instructions. All staff are required to know the emergency response procedures for their facility and support their own, colleague, patient/resident and visitors' safety.

Summoning help in an emergency or disaster - Main sites

Where possible, members of the public should notify staff if they witness an emergency or disaster. However, if you are unable to do so, you can dial 55555 while at a main St. Joseph’s facility from any hospital phone. This includes:

  • St. Joseph’s Hospital
  • Mount Hope Centre for Long Term Care
  • Parkwood Institute
  • Southwest Centre for Forensic Mental Health Care

In most cases, the room number of the location is posted on the phone. Security will ask for the location. Read the number on the phone if available. If not, look for the closest room number or location.

Summoning help in an emergency or disaster - Off-site facilities

In our smaller, off site locations, the public should alert a staff member. If a staff member is not available at one of these locations, the public is asked to dial 9-1-1. Our off-site facilities include:

  • St. Joseph’s Family Medical and Dental Centre
  • Infectious Diseases Care Program
  • ACT team offices

Knowing when there’s an emergency

In St. Joseph's larger facilities, an overhead announcement system is used to alert the building of an emergency or disaster situation. Most often, “your attention please…” is announced followed by a “code” with a colour and, in some cases, additional information such as actions that need to be taken.

​​​If a member of the public is on site and affected by an emergency or disaster, he or she is encouraged to call the Patient Relations Coordinator should access to resources or support be needed as a result of the event. Sometimes witnessing a traumatic event such as a medical emergency can be upsetting and St. Joseph's wants to ensure the public is supported.

Taking instructions from staff and emergency services workers

With well-trained security and emergency response teams, St. Joseph’s has the capacity to manage many emergency situations without requiring external emergency services. However, St. Jospeh's works closely with emergency services in the community and conduct a collaborative response to events as required (e.g., fire, hazardous materials events, etc.). When emergency services responders arrive, members of the public should follow the orders or direction of emergency services workers.

If a member of the public has a specific need related to an emergency or disaster while visiting, please advise a staff member or emergency services worker immediately (e.g., a physical disability that will require a specific approach to help support your needs).

Service delays, reductions or deferrals

In some instances, St. Joseph’s may decide that it is in the best interest of patients, visitors or staff to delay some services or  reduce or defer service levels due to an emergency or disaster. Members of the public will be made aware of this through our Communication and Public Affairs team and local media, or from the care area or program affected by way of a telephone call if you were expected to attend the area/program.

 

For additional information related to emergency preparedness and the Integrated Accessibility Standard, please contact:

Patient relations coordinator
St. Joseph’s Health Care London
P.O. Box 5777
London, Ontario, N6A 4V2
Phone: 519 646-6100 ext. 64727
Email: @email
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