Supervised drug site set to open doors on Monday
Permanent facility replaces stop-gap trailer at Chumir Health Centre
A permanent supervised drug consumption site will open its doors in the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre on Monday, replacing a temporary facility that handled 2,551 visits by more than 300 people in two months.
Claire O’Gorman, program coordinator with Safeworks, said 55 overdoses were reversed between Oct. 30 and Dec. 31 at the trailer outside the health centre.
“There’s 55 lives saved already,” she said during a tour of the facility Friday. “We’re making a difference here in our community.”
The newly constructed site, accessible by a separate entrance on 13th Avenue, incorporates a reception area, a consumption room with six booths and two nurse stations, and a post-consumption room.
O’Gorman said the goal of the site is to reduce deaths from the opioid crisis and mitigate other health risks associated with drug use.
The aim is also to de-stigmatize substance use and ensure that people who use drugs know the service is there for them.
The facility provides low-barrier access, not requiring users to show identification or health care cards.
“It communicates that we care and we want to provide ethical, compassionate care to all of our clients, and I think that it’s part of that continuum of services,” she said.
“It’s not going to be the silver bullet, but it’s a really important piece in beginning to address the opioid crisis, as well as all of the other challenges that come with substance use.”
Services also include a social worker who can work with clients on other needs, such as food security and housing, and clients can be referred to the opioid dependency program in the Sheldon Chumir or to detox services.
Without the supervised consumption services, the clients in the 55 overdose cases at the temporary site would likely have been using substances in public or in unsupervised spaces such as alleyways or bathrooms, said O’Gorman.
“For a lot of our clients, they’re experiencing multiple forms of vulnerability, so homelessness or poverty,” she said. “It’s really important that we’re able to respond for especially those folks who don’t have other places to go.”
From Oct. 30 to Dec. 31, 11 clients were referred to the opioid dependency program and 45 were referred to social work for support and connections to other services, according to Alberta Health Services. The facility has also been distributing more than 100 naloxone kits a month. It is a medication designed to rapidly reverse opioid overdose.
Associate minister of health Brandy Payne said the temporary Calgary facility experienced great success.
“Having the permanent site being open — I think it’s going to show to individuals who are using substances that we care about the future and we want them to have the wrap-around services that they need, and to be as safe as they can,” Payne told reporters.
Four supervised consumption sites are scheduled to open in Edmonton over the next year, in addition to a site in Lethbridge.
In the first nine months of 2017, there were 482 opioid- related deaths in Alberta. In 2016, 363 people died of apparent fentanylrelated overdoses in the province.