Survey: Mental Health Professional

Who we are
Eli's Place is a non-profit residential mental health program in Ontario, a working farm where clinical care, meaningful work and community are part of everyday life, and where young adults living with serious mental illness build a life worth living.

Why we are asking
Eli's Place is preparing to open in Ontario this fall. It is a new model of care in Canada, and clinicians and other professionals will be among the first to assess it against what they already know. Before we open, we want to understand how the program reads to you, where you would situate it in the care landscape, and what would make it something you could refer to or endorse. Your answers will shape how we describe the program and how we work with the professional community.

This is a professional survey
These questions are about your practice and your professional view, not about any individual patient. Please do not include anything that could identify a patient in the written answers.

This survey is anonymous
We do not ask for your name or contact details anywhere in this survey. Responses are held securely and reported only in summary. After you submit, you will be redirected to a separate, optional form where you can join a mailing list for clinicians and referrers. Anything you enter there stays separate from your answers here.

You can skip anything
The survey takes approximately 20 minutes. You can skip any question, and most offer 'Prefer not to say'. An incomplete response is still useful to us.

If you have questions about this survey, you can contact us at https://elisplace.org/contact/

By continuing, you are agreeing that you have read and understood the description above.

A few questions about your work, so we can read the rest of your answers in context.

Here is a description of Eli's Place, written with a mental health professional audience in mind. Please read it, then tell us how it reads to you as a professional.

Eli's Place is a working farm north of Guelph, Ontario. When it opens it will be the first long-term therapeutic community in Canada to integrate clinical care, meaningful work and belonging for young adults living with serious mental illness.

It is not a hospital and not a crisis service. It is the recovery that comes after, for people who are past the acute stage and ready to use a long stretch of time to build something.

Guests live here for around six months, with real work on the land, clinical care alongside it and the ordinary business of a life shared with others. What makes it work is the combination and the time. Support continues past the stay itself, through each Guest's move on to housing, education and work.

Loyola House will be a home, not a hospital ward. Guests look after themselves day to day, and around that Eli's Place provides a room of one's own, meals shared with the community, clinical care on site, and staff who take part in the life of the community alongside Guests.

What makes the clinical model distinctive is how care is delivered, not only where. Rather than the high structure of a hospital or the fixed appointment blocks of a traditional program, clinical support is woven into the ordinary life of the community. The daily rhythm, the shared meals, the work and the relationships Guests build with staff are themselves part of the treatment rather than a backdrop to it. Guests are shoulder to shoulder with staff through the day, not seen only in scheduled sessions.

The approach is recovery-oriented and individual. Regulated health professionals provide individual and group clinical care alongside the life of the community, planning is strengths-based and built around each Guest's own goals, and Eli's Place coordinates with a Guest's existing psychiatric, hospital and community providers rather than replacing them. Structure and safety are held firmly, calibrated to an open, voluntary residential setting rather than an acute inpatient one.

Every Guest has at least one family member or support person who takes part in their treatment and in planning what comes next. Recovery has to hold after the stay ends, and it holds better when the people closest to a Guest have been part of building it.

Thinking about the description above, how much do you agree with each of the following?

Eli's Place is modelled on Gould Farm, a residential therapeutic community in Massachusetts that has been running for over a century. A study published in 2019 followed Gould Farm Guests over fifteen years and found improvement across clinical and quality of life measures from admission to discharge, with most gains holding at six, eighteen and thirty-six months afterwards. Eli's Place is adapting that model rather than copying it.

Eli's Place has a defined standard for who it can admit. Some of it follows from the program itself, and some from the setting, which is open and voluntary rather than secure.

How much do you agree that each is a reasonable and workable condition for inclusion in a program like this?

How much do you agree that each is a reasonable and workable condition for exclusion from a program like this?

Eli's Place is a private, non-profit facility that relies on user-pay. This means payment is required for each Guest's stay and continued transitional support. Government funding is not currently available for a program like ours, and we are not yet in a position to offer subsidies or reduced rates. That may change in time, but it is where we stand today.

Guests live at Eli's Place for around six months, then continue with clinical support and coordination for about another eight months as they re-establish themselves in the community.

Across the whole engagement, the cost may fall in the range of $100,000 to $120,000, depending on how long a Guest stays.

This is what the program costs to run. We are a non-profit, so the fees are set to sustain the program and nothing more. There are no owners and no shareholders, and anything left over goes back into the program. We want to understand how this level of cost affects your professional view of the program and whether it would affect your willingness to refer.

Thank you for taking the time. These answers will shape how we describe Eli's Place, how we plan for our first year, and what we learn about the need for programs like this in Canada.

Once you click "Submit Survey", you will be redirected to an optional signup form for targeted mailing lists.