Dorie’s House to reopen in Swift Current with broader mandate and stable funding
The long-awaited reopening of Dorie’s House in Swift Current will take place this spring with a new mandate and a stable source of provincial funding.
The Dorie’s House Treatment Centre became a reality as a result of an agreement between the Southwest Youth Emergency Shelter (SWYES) and the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA), which was announced on Feb. 22.
Dorie’s House will function as a treatment centre for substance misuse and an emergency shelter for homeless youth aged 12-18.
“I'm so excited to be able to announce this project and the fact that we've been able to find our funding feet, and really I think in the right way too,” SWYES Board President Shaun Hanna told the Prairie Post. “Before, we were always looking at residential support services and seeing how that looks like, but now with this new partnership with the Health Authority we're able to add a therapeutic dimension to the program, which means a whole lot more capacity, which means a whole lot more people helped and in the right way and in a very timely way. So I'm just super thrilled.”
SWYES was established several years ago as a non-profit organization to further a longstanding goal to establish a youth emergency shelter in southwest Saskatchewan. It received strong support from the community, which resulted in the community-funded construction of Dorie’s House. The facility was open for eight months during 2017 as a pilot project to highlight the need for such a service in the region, but the doors of the eight-bed facility had to close due to lack of funding.
The SWYES board had been building partnerships and considering options to reopen Dorie’s House, but the key stumbling block was the lack of core funding.
“This project came from 2013 onwards and up to this point all of our operational funds have been strictly by the good will and donation of the people of southwest Saskatchewan, and that's no small number,” he said. “It's a very large number that's been donated to us, and we've been very mindful over the last few year of how do we ensure that we operate effectively and efficiently with it, which is why we've been so cautious over the last few years about how we proceed and how we build those partnerships. The downside of course is that without a core funding model in place, it really closes off a lot of doors to other grants that might be available. Now that we have the core funding in place, those avenues really do open up for us, which is very exciting.”
The agreement with SHA will make additional youth addictions treatment services available in southern Saskatchewan through the offering of inpatient and outpatient services at Dorie’s House. There will be six residential inpatient treatment spaces, another four to six outpatient spaces, as well as a two-bed emergency shelter program.
Hanna felt the expansion of the purpose of Dorie’s House to also become an addictions treatment centre fits well with the original goal to address youth homelessness.
“Throughout the history of this project getting to this point, a lot of this project did come out of the context of the addiction services piece,” he said. “Part of the reason is that when you look at clients that are coming to a program with substance misuse issues, their precarious housing and issues that also follow often go hand in hand. They're often two sides of the same coin. So this is actually a better deal in many ways.”
SWYES always had to be mindful of its capacity to offer assistance when Dorie’s House was open as a pilot project, and where necessary they had to connect youth with services available through other organizations.
“So this shift means that we have an expanded mandate, it means that we have the ability to have psychiatric care inserted into our program, it means that we can deliver a lot more services more efficiently,” he said. “It is a shift in mandate, but part of that shift also means that we're also falling within a context that makes sense for our funding partners as well. The other thing that I would just say is that the SHA was actually really adamant about honouring that emergency shelter piece and that we retain some bedrooms for that purpose. So what was really exciting for me is just that mindfulness of who we are as an organization and how we can fit within their programs.”
He believes the partnership with SHA will lead to the creation of a centre of excellence that will be unique in the region.
“Our approach and the approach that SHA is taking with this project is really to try to get the best of the best practices and house them under one roof in terms of service delivery, in terms of recreational delivery, and ultimately trying to get as many avenues as possible open to clients as we can,” he said. “It's not that we're building or reinventing the wheel by any means, but I think we are creating a treatment program that's unique certainly to the province and it's going to be housed right here in southwest Saskatchewan, which is I think is amazing.”
The youth addiction treatment program at Dorie’s House is starting with a financial commitment of $800,000 from the provincial government, of which $465,000 is for SWYES. The remaining $335,000 is for the SHA programs to support this initiative.
SHA Mental Health and Addictions South West Director Michael Seiferling is excited about the possibilities of this partnership merge model to offer treatment services in southern Saskatchewan.
“There are a lot of unique features to this and it's very new and it's a little unlike anything we've done before, but I think our problems in mental health and addiction are a little unlike what we're used to,” he said. “So new challenges require new solutions.”
One of the unique aspects of this agreement is that SHA will be working with a contract partner that will provide the residential support while SHA will deliver the clinical services.
“Traditionally these types of services go one of two ways,” he explained. “They're either delivered fully by the SHA or delivered fully by a community-based organization, and this project would be I think the first to my knowledge where we've had a really deep collaboration and partnership where two partners are coming together in a single building to provide this type of integrated collaborative care.”
A full-time SHA staff member will be working at the Dorie’s House Treatment Centre, who will be running the clinical program. Another staff will be part of the treatment that provides support for the admission and discharge of individuals, and resources will be available to ensure after hours access to nursing and addiction medicine support.
The residential component will typically be a fourweek program, but it can be extended for up to 16 weeks of intensive in-home support. The clinical program is based on the Matrix Model of addiction treatment, which was developed at the Matrix Institute on Addictions in California.
“It was actually designed as an outpatient therapy and we would see part of these positions supports are designated to ensure follow-up and continued participation for those individuals post discharge from the residential model for up to a year into their community,” he said. “We would hope that the treatment benefit would be actualized within a year, and that the individual has strong recovery support. So the initial stay could range from four to 16 weeks, but there's also an aftercare component that can follow the client for up to about a year after discharge.”
The immediate availability of the facility in Swift Current was a consideration in the selection of SWYES as the SHA partner, but Seiferling said a more important consideration was the past experience of using Dorie’s House for providing residential support.
“We knew going into this that we really want to do something that wasn't quite as traditional as what we've done before,” he said. “The type of partnership we were wanting was to partner with an agency that had a good sense of the residential continuum and have some expertise in what it is to providing support to high-risk youth.”
He is aware of what it will mean to the community to see Dorie’s House re-open, and one of the most exciting parts of this project is to see this partnership come to life.
“We really hit something that works for both partners and really works for the community,” he said. “So we're very excited of what this means for the community in Swift
Current that supported that organization for a long time.”