Category — Poverty and addiction

Vancouver Police Department officers are still spending hundreds of hours a year waiting at Vancouver hospitals to “hand off” mental health patients they have apprehended, according to a VPD memo to city council, but the average wait is going down.

Thanks to new measures introduced by the hospitals, police officers are waiting an average 60 minutes to hand off a patient, down from 71 minutes before the new program.

Nonetheless, this memo from VPD Inspector Ralph Pauw, prepared for council at the request of Councillor Kerry Jang, makes it clear that city taxpayers are still paying a high policing cost to fill gaps in the province’s patchwork mental health system. VPD pays police officers for hundreds of hours a year to stand waiting at the hospital for the hand-off.

Pauw advocates a simple change to regulations to allow qualified nurses, not just busy physicians, to determine that admission to hospital is required. Once that decision is made, police officers could go back to their real jobs — and much faster.

Ever since Vancouver’s low barrier shelters opened in the wake of Gregor Robertson’s 2008 election victory, the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association has carefully monitored aggressive panhandling, open drug use and numbers of street homeless in its 96-block district.

The latest summary, circulated last week by the BIA’s Charles Gauthier, shows that the benefits continue for downtown businesses, with incidents of street disorder trending down as shelters open.

Continuing coverage of the problems at VGH’s psychiatric facility have largely glossed over the huge cost to city taxpayers that results from the failutre to fund mental health services.

Nineteen mentally ill individuals Vancouver police sought to refer to treatment at the Burnaby Centre for Mental Health and Addictions simply had their files closed by provincial authorities, according to this week’s new Vancouver Police Department report on the issue.

These individuals went on to trigger “619 documented police contacts where they were suspects, or suspects chargeable, or charges recommended or charged with a criminal offence or listed as being involved in a mental health incident.”

Even more disturbing, according to the report, released Monday, “five of the 19 (26%), were victims in eight incidents including assault, assault with a weapon, uttering threats and robbery with a weapon.”

The report by Inspector Scott Thompson, entitled Policing Vancouver’s Mentally Ill: the Disturbing Truth, is a an indictment of Victoria’s claim that community-based care is providing sufficient support for the mentally ill. It’s yet another example of provincial cuts forcing a downloading of costs to city-funded services that are not equipped for the job. [Read more →]

What’s the next step in the City of Vancouver’s fight against poverty and addiction? That question was very much in the air this morning at a meeting of the Four Pillars Coalition convened by Mayor Gregor Robertson.

It’s been almost 10 years since NPA Mayor Phillip Owen was forced out by his own party for championing the Four Pillars Strategy and a supervised injection site as the answer to Vancouver’s crisis of addiction and HIV infection.

The fate of Insite, opened in 2003 thanks to the leadership of Mayor Larry Campbell, will be settled once and for all May 12 by the Supreme Court of Canada. That’s the day the court will release its decision on an appeal, launched by the Harper Conservatives, of a BC Supreme Court ruling that blocked Ottawa’s attempts to shut the site down.

These days, Insite is turning away potential clients, particularly on welfare cheque days when the line-ups virtually stretch out the door.

The scientific analysis is clear: Insite has reduced HIV infection rates, overdose deaths, street disorder and drug crime. Now the Urban Health Research Initiative has concluded the site is also helping addicts obtain treatment and get clear of their addiction.

Dr. Julio Montaner, executive director of the Centre of Excellence for HIV/AIDS, told this morning’s meeting that the success of harm reduction strategies and HAART — highly active anti-retroviral therapy — have combined to produce dramatic drops in HIV infection rates. In effect, HAART treatment  is also preventing new infections.

But Ottawa, far from heeding the science, remains focussed on failed strategies and even seeks to shut Insite down. [Read more →]