FOCUS Accreditation recently awarded Brantford’s Participation Support Services a four-year re-accreditation, effective December 2025 to December 2029, in recognition of the organization’s commitment to maintaining a standard of excellence in the community support services sector.
Additionally, Participation Support Services received the Seal of Sustainability Award in acknowledgement of its accreditation over three cycles, highlighting the organization’s ongoing dedication to quality improvement.
Participation Support Services (PSS), formerly known as Participation House, was established in 1975 to help individuals with physical disabilities who had been inappropriately placed in large institutions and chronic care wards, giving them a space to call home.
Now 50 years later, PSS provides services for individuals with a physical disability, complex care needs and seniors.
“Over the years, we’ve expanded our housing support for people with disabilities, and we started an outreach model where we provide home care as well ,” said Sherry Kerr, Executive Director for PSS. “In 2009, we started providing seniors care. So we do transitional care by getting people out of the hospital who are either waiting for long-term care, or some other means to live if they’ve been hospitalized and can’t go home. We have assisted living for high-risk seniors, and our newest program, which is the Let’s Go Home Program (LEGHO), helps people who are in the hospital that don’t really need to be there, but aren’t able to cope at home for some socio-economic reason. So we’ll go in for six to eight weeks, provide meals on wheels, and provide transportation to and from the hospital or medical appointments to help stabilize them at home.”
When it comes to securing a FOCUS accreditation, the process is rigorous and involves a comprehensive review of an organization’s operations, programs and services as well as performance against established benchmarks. Receiving re-accreditation status means PSS successfully met those standards and demonstrated its dedication to quality and continuous improvement.
“The front-line staff and management at Participation Support Services work very hard to ensure the care provided to the clients is exceptional every day and the Board of Directors are thrilled PSS has achieved another much deserved four-year re-accreditation,” said Steve Smith, Chairman of the Board of Directors.
Kerr added that having the re-accreditation in place will also help assure PSS service users, its partners and the community that they can trust in the organization.
“It provides the people that we support as well as others, with some validation that we are meeting provincial standards, but it also gives a chance to recognize our staff for the hard work they do and how well they care for the people we support,” she said. “And then for our funders [Ontario Health and Ontario Health atHome], because our sector does have the same compliance system as Community Living or long-term care, it provides them reassurance that we are still meeting provincial quality standards.”
Cheryl Whiteman, Executive Director of FOCUS Accreditation, said she looks forward to PSS’s continuing its journey of excellence and innovation, and commended the organization for choosing to undergo evaluation by a third party.
“Welcoming an external accrediting body into the organization is a vulnerable step, one that reflects strong leadership and a commitment to integrity and transparency,” she said. “By doing so, the organization demonstrates to its stakeholders that it upholds the highest values of accountability, honesty, and continuous improvement.”
Overall, Kerr said she was proud of her PSS team, praising them for their work even through tough times.
“We’re very excited to have received this,” she said. “We did a lot of the work in the past couple years to get prepared for this accreditation, so it feels really good because it was a couple hard years through 2021 and even into 2022.”
FOCUS is a non-profit accreditation agency for community service organizations. Created in Ontario, Canada, by the very people who use and work in these services, FOCUS reflects the culture and expectations of community service organizations in Canada.
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
