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.
CCKO Resources
- Practice Guidelines: Recommendations for Effective Collaboration Between HCCSS Care Coordinators and CCKO Nurse Practitioners
- CCKO Standard Operational Definition (2019)
- CCKO Medical Care Plan Standard
- CCKO Function of a Complex Care Clinic and Program Standard
- CCKO Youth Transition to Adult Care Toolkit
- Referral Process for Existing Patients to Other Complex Care Clinics
- COVID-19 FAQ Information Page for CMC
- It’s About Time: Rapid Implementation of a Hub-and-Spoke Care Delivery Model for Tertiary-Integrated Complex Care Services in a Northern Ontario Community (Longwoods, Healthcare Quarterly, Major et al., 2018)
- Complex care for kids Ontario: Protocol for a Mixed-methods Randomized Controlled Trial of a Population-level care Coordination Initiative for Children with Medical Complexity (Orkin et al., 2019)
- Process Evaluation of a Hub-and-Spoke Model to Deliver Coordinated Care for Children with Medical Complexity across Ontario: Facilitators, Barriers and Lessons Learned (Longwoods, Healthcare Policy, Lin et al., 2021)
- Effectiveness of Structured Care Coordination for Children with Medical Complexity: The Complex Care for Kids Ontario (CCKO) Randomized Clinical Trial (JAMA Pediatrics; Cohen, Quartarone, Orkin et al., 2023)
Please contact for more information about CCKO and its programs.
