June sets record for OD cases in local ERs

The number of drug overdose victims who required hospital treatment spiked in June to record levels as the city’s opioid crisis continued to gather pace.

Statistics released by Ottawa Public Health show 135 people were taken to local emergency departments because of drug overdoses during four weeks in June — more than in any other four-week period in two-and-a-half years.

The final week of June saw 42 taken to hospital with potentially life-threatening drug overdoses. It’s the highest weekly total recorded in the city’s overdose database.

The numbers confirm Ottawa’s opioid crisis continues to deepen even as local health officials take extraordinary measures to combat it.

This week, Inner City Health announced it started to prescribe Dilaudid, a powerful opioid, to people whose lives are at risk because of their addictions. That news came one week after the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre received federal approval to open a safe injection site where users can take drugs under medical supervision.

“Our clients have been reporting high rates of overdose for many months now,” said Rob Boyd, an executive with the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre.

The centre is now finalizing the budget and design of its supervised injection site, expected to open later this year.

“It feels like there’s a fast approaching deadly storm and we are not going to be able to get the shelter built in time,” Boyd said Friday. “It’s difficult to feel this urgency and not be up and running today.”

Boyd said he was also worried about recent news out of Toronto, where four people died from drug overdoses in less than a week.

Many deaths and overdoses have been tied to fentanyl, a dangerous opioid added to other drugs to heighten their euphoric effect — sometimes without users aware of its presence. Bootleg fentanyl made in clandestine labs can be 30 to 50 times more powerful than heroin, another white powder, and even small doses can be lethal.

Boyd said emergency department numbers represent the best “sentinel data” for the city’s opioid crisis, but he cautioned that those figures reflect only a fraction of the problem because many users avoid emergency departments and will not call paramedics.

Gillian Connelly, manager of health promotion and disease prevention at Ottawa Public Health, said the city has seen a steady increase in the number of overdose victims going to hospital.

Early in the year, she said, the city’s emergency departments typically saw two to four overdose patients each day, while now they’re more likely to see four or five.

In both March and April, 108 people sought emergency hospital treatment for drug overdoses. In May, that figure climbed to 127, and in June it hit 135.

The city’s preliminary data for July shows overdose emergency department visits may have dropped slightly. Connelly said that may reflect the extensive work public health officials did with music festival organizers to prepare security agents and volunteers to recognize and respond to drug overdoses.

The public health department also reached out to users through blogs, social media and public service announcements.