A recent letter to the editor in the
Advocate has suggested it's a bad idea to spend public money on a
provincial wellness initiative, when there are so many non-profits
able to handle that portfolio for the province, at a much cheaper
cost.
Since the new Alberta government is
about to release its first provincial budget, I thought I might point
out a local community wellness project to remind us that community
wellness has a pretty high return on investment. And that if we want
to maximize profits from these investments, it makes sense to “go
big” and have them cover the entire province.
I recently attended the annual general
meeting for the Red Deer Canadian Mental Health Association. When you
volunteer, you're a member (my wife also works for CMHA).
One of the duties performed at an AGM
is to recognize exemplary work within the organization and hand out
awards. The first award given this year was to Red Deer's Police and
Crisis Team (PACT).
Actually, Red Deer has two such teams,
and there is a push on to both create a third Red Deer team, and also
to demonstrate the need for a regional team outside the city. That's
if the organizers can find the money (which in this case means
investment from Alberta Health Services).
A PACT team consists of two members: a
full-time RCMP member and a registered nurse with mental health
training. They are called to cases where mental health issues are
involved, or where people under significant stress may harm
themselves or others.
The police staff are paid out of the
general policing budget. It's a full-time placement — they have no
outside policing duties. Red Deer's Primary Care Network has found
budget for the nursing side. So, as far as spending for mental health
services goes, it's a pretty cheap deal.
The problem is that the PACT teams are
so successful, a third team needs to be added. Red Deer RCMP have
already said they would find staff budget internally for a third
officer, but PCN cannot expand the program with their current
funding.
More, the success of the program has
extended beyond city's RCMP jurisdiction. Red Deer police cannot fund
a regional program, but depression, anxiety, suicide and other mental
illnesses do not respect city boundaries.
We were told that last year, the Red
Deer PACT teams attended to 805 cases. Where previously they would
generally have ended in arrest or a forced visit to the hospital
emergency ward, in 740 cases — 92 per cent — people were instead
put in touch with local support services instead.
The savings to taxpayers in both our
health and the justice systems are huge.
Without PACT, when a situation comes to
the point where police are called, arrest or a trip to emergency ward
are pretty well the only two possible outcomes. Police are not
trained to make mental health assessments and are not trained to
bring people to other services.
I was able to find that a visit to an
Alberta emergency ward costs taxpayers on average between $150 and
$225 per visit. When police take people to the emergency ward, they
must stay with their charges until medical staff can take over
responsibility for them. The wait can last hours, adding to the cost
to taxpayers, and taking police away from other duties.
Anyone with a calculator can make a
rough calculation of the cost of 700 or so emergency ward visits, and
only guess at the staff costs for the hours spent by police sitting,
waiting.
I was also able to find that in 2004/05
there were 40,000 emergency visits for mental health reasons in
Alberta. Another provincial site posted that 12-15 per cent of all
health disorders are for mental health.
Yet, in much of the province, a mental
health crisis is dealt with by police alone, and people who are sick
end up in the criminal justice system. That's what police are trained
to do with someone who's at risk of harm to themselves or others.
The tax cost of this is nearly
impossible to calculate, not just the cost to taxpayers of this
misuse of the justice system, but of the lost opportunities for
well-being of people who shouldn't have gone into the justice system
in the first place.
The current practice criminalizes
mental illness, delays treatment and raises needless fears in the
community that people who are mentally ill are dangerous. We've seen
these fears played up even in the current federal election campaign.
The cost of all this can easily be
prevented, if we invest in a cross-provincial PACT program. Locally,
we could at least free up more emergency ward time for local
patients, and clear court time for other cases, if we expanded this
wellness program here.
But it's not the job of non-profits to
do this on their own. They must be funded. With tax dollars. And if
we want to save hundreds of millions we now spend in Alberta's
emergency wards, on jails, courts and police time, a few million
spent on a provincial wellness program isn't such a bad idea at all.
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