TRANSITION CENTRE
Mentally ill get new help
Bringing together mental-health services in one spot at an Ouellette Avenue centre has been working so well since being initiated last year that Windsor agencies are seeking up to $1.8 million in new funding for outreach to help more people dealing with mental illness.
“The need is very much there,” Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare president and CEO Janice Kaffer said Thursday.
Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare and the local Canadian Mental Health Association plan to make a business case to expand the services at the 744 Ouellette Avenue Transitional Stability Centre and ask the local Health Integration Network for funding of between $1.2 million and $1.8 million.
The two groups pooled their resources without extra funding in late 2016 to offer more mental-health services in one spot on Ouellette Avenue. Without a lot of publicity, the Transitional Stability Centre was so successful it now wants to work with the Downtown Mission and Family Services Windsor to start spreading the services offered at the centre into the community for people who can’t get downtown or who are unlikely to seek help there, Kaffer said.
The point of the Transitional Stability Centre is to make accessing mental-health services less confusing. Instead of having people go to any number of places for help, including an ER or walking into the Canadian Mental Health Association office on Windsor Avenue, people can go to the centre and let staff there connect them to the right treatment and for followup. In the past, people might have gotten referred from place to place and then given up because it was too difficult. People can go back to the centre repeatedly, and if they end up on a wait list for treatment they will be monitored.
“It’s actually been successful beyond our wildest dreams,” Kaffer said.
By Jan. 22 more crisis workers, about 22 of them, will be at the centre. People experiencing a mental-health emergency can contact the community crisis service at 519-973-4435, which is answered around the clock, or go to the nearest hospital emergency department.
The Transitional Stability Centre, which is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., hopes to help people before they reach a crisis stage. Robert Moroz, integrated director of outpatient and community services with Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare and the local Canadian Mental Health Association, said people more often seek help and stay in treatment if the confusion of fragmented services is removed and if someone follows up until they are in the right program.
“We’re trying to get it so people don’t have to search around,” Moroz said.
The centre plans to improve its signs at 744 Ouellette Avenue so more people can find it. The centre helps people seeking mental-health services for the first time or people receiving services from agencies but who will benefit more from the coordinated approach. The downtown location works because those being helped are people who are homeless or at risk of being homeless, people who have frequently gone to the ER for mental-health services or who are people who are difficult to engage but pose no danger to themselves or others.
One in five people have experienced a mental-health issue and Kaffer said she expects that to increase. In the first seven months of last year the centre served 551 clients and the number is growing, she said.