The Black Creek Community Health Centre is taking a different approach to health care, going beyond the walls of its facility and into neighbourhood streets.Black Creek is one of Toronto’s 31 Neighbourhood Improvement Areas (NIAs), it scored the lowest of all Toronto neighbourhoods in the city’s Neighbourhood Equity Index. Simply put, low equity can look like higher unemployment, fewer high school graduations, lack of community spaces and declining health.That’s why the Black Creek Community Health Centre is taking health care beyond its physical headquarters to provide services to locals in the immediate neighbourhood. Tamanah Sultani, a health promoter at the centre, says there are stigmas in Black Creek against vaccines and medications, as well as doubts about the services it provides. “That’s what we try to help with, it’s to kind of reduce those stigmas, and build a team that’s very trustworthy and a team that the community recognizes — that they see on a daily basis, that live in the community,” she explains. One of the centre’s newest tools is Wheels to Wellness, a mobile health unit equipped with blood-sugar and blood-pressure testing.Dr. Mar Lyn, the centre’s low-density population health manager, drives the health care van through the streets of Black Creek, stopping at apartment complexes, parks and common community spaces to provide health checkups to local residents.“The traditional approach to medicine has failed a certain group of people. They have not been able to get the access that they deserve because they’re dealing with their immediate needs, which is food, clothing and shelter,” Lyn explains. “Oftentimes, those take precedence over their actual health.”He adds that residents only attend to their health when they end up in an emergency room, at a very late stage, which ultimately costs Ontario’s health-care system thousands of dollars. Wheels to Wellness isn’t the centre’s first innovation. In early 2019, it started a community ambassador program where health-care professionals trained local residents to share information about general health checkups with their neighbours.As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, these ambassadors helped fight medical misinformation, and encouraged people who were unwilling or unable to visit Black Creek Community Health Centre to get the right care.The centre also started a diabetes-focused coaching program. It targets Black Creek’s large African, Caribbean and Black population, who are at a higher risk of getting diabetes, according to a January 2025 study funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) and Public Health Ontario (PHO).Health-care professionals trained 15 residents to be coaches, including Festus Eromi Paul who got connected to a dietician at the centre two years ago. The dietician monitored Paul’s food intake and activities for a year, which helped him reverse his diabetic condition. “From what I’ve experienced practically, I did and it worked, so I just want to give back to the community. So that’s why I joined to become a health coach,” he says.As of last month, the centre made profiles for the health coaches on its website, and started contacting people at risk of getting diabetes, offering four months of coaching on healthy living to prevent the chronic disease.