ByWard Market supervised injection trailer to get permanent home
Laurie Fagan | CBC News | Posted: July 3, 2019 8:00 AM | Last Updated: July 3, 2019
Will be set up in Shepherds of Good Hope building; likely open in 2020
A permanent supervised injection site will be built in the ByWard Market, replacing the one in a converted construction trailer in the parking lot of the Shepherds of Good Hope shelter on Murray Street.
Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott was in Ottawa on Tuesday to make the $2-million announcement, which also included $5.1 million for drug and mental health services.
"Our government is keeping our promise to make mental health and addictions a priority," Elliott said.
The Ottawa Inner City Health trailer began taking clients in November 2017 as a stopgap measure because of the increase in opioid overdoses.
Demand grew for the site when the deadly drug fentanyl began surfacing in the city's illicit drug supply. By March of this year, the trailer had seen nearly 50,000 visits.
'A proper facility'
Wendy Muckle, Ottawa Inner City Health's executive director, said the new facility will be in a Shepherds of Good Hope building at 256 King Edward Ave., next to the shelter, and it will be larger than the trailer — adding two more injection booths from the current 12.
"Obviously we are pleased," she said.
"Living out of a construction trailer was never our intention and it will be great to have a proper facility for the services we offer."
Muckle said the new site will also have a dedicated clinical room to apply dressings; it's noq done in an open area with little privacy for clients.
"It will be great to have a little more capacity which we desperately need right now," Muckle said.
The new site will have a telemedicine program that will match clients with soft-tissue infections with infectious disease experts at the Queensway-Carleton Hospital.
Muckle said she would love to be in the new building by December, but it will most likely open sometime next year.
Services 'necessary to save lives'
After winning the election last year, the Progressive Conservative government conducted a review of supervised injection sites.
Ottawa Inner City Health sent several injection site users to Toronto when Elliott, one of the few ministers to stay in her role during last month's cabinet shuffle, conducted her review.
Elliott said those discussions helped solidify the need for consumption sites and the help they provide.
"I met with people with lived experience and they told me in no uncertain terms that these services were necessary to save lives," she said.
"It takes a long time to build trust and they take a negative view of conventional medicine so they need a place where they will be treated with respect and compassion and that was something of a surprise to me."
Her government also cut funding to the nearby supervised injection site on Clarence Street, which then got funding from the federal government to keep it open until the end of the year.