Mobile ER joins the opioid fight
Portable unit used for Olympics moving to Downtown Eastside
The province’s mobile medical unit has served as a MASH-like emergency room at the Olympics, festivals and outside hospitals mid-renovation. And on Tuesday, it will start saving lives in the Downtown Eastside.
Inside a tent with all the necessary equipment and staffed with a half-dozen emergency doctors plus nurses and paramedics, the mobile unit will operate 18 hours a day for as long as it’s needed in the fight against opioids, officials said.
“This is in response to the overwhelming number of overdoses coming to St. Paul’s Hospital emergency department and the incredible demand on B.C. Ambulance,” said Dr. Patricia Daly, chief medical officer of Vancouver Coastal Health. “We hope by bringing overdoses here and treating them here, it will free up the ambulances, it will free up St. Paul’s emergency.
“But the other thing we’re doing here — this is really important — we want to try to link clients more quickly to addiction treatment.”
The only way to overcome the epidemic of opioid overdoses is to treat users and get them off illegal drugs by offering suboxone, methadone, prescription heroin and prescription hydromorphone, she said.
“We want to look at all possibilities. That’s really the only solution for the crisis right now,” she said.
The province inherited the mobile medical unit from the Olympics, where it was based at Whistler.
Vancouver Coastal suggested it be placed in the Downtown Eastside — beside the community garden across from Save On Meats on Hastings Street — and raised the idea with provincial Health Minister Terry Lake last week.
“People can be treated here on site,” Lake said. “But importantly, they can be linked to addiction specialists and further services provided.”
“This is a province health resource, and I can’t think of a better way to use it than here in the Downtown Eastside,” Lake added.
There are eight gurneys inside the tight quarters of the unit.
Dr. Keith Ahamad, an addictions physician at St. Paul’s, called it a revolutionary approach in battling overdoses.
“I don’t know of anywhere in the world that has done anything like it to deal with an overdose epidemic like this,” he said. “All the agencies that are involved — just the community of physicians and nurses and other support groups that have come together to staff this mobile medical unit.
“To have addiction services, an addiction medicine program and emergency services all together in one spot is, I think, unprecedented.
Meanwhile, a federal government move on Monday to ease Bill C-2 restrictions on supervised injection sites came as a relief to Coastal Health’s Daly.
“It’s a good thing. We’ve been asking for this for a long, long time,” she said. “It’s incredibly onerous under Bill C-2 to apply for an exemption.”
Easing the criteria that need to be met by 80 per cent means new supervised sites can start operating more quickly in Metro Vancouver, she said.
“We need to get these things up and going quickly, because people are dying while we’re waiting,” she said.
This follows the establishment of emergency tents last week in Vancouver, Surrey and Victoria that give users a warm and covered place with volunteers trained in administering naloxone. Organizers insist they are not supervised injection sites and thus do not need federal approval.
The provincial health minister was also pleased with the easing of Bill C-2’s restrictions.
“To see us going down from 26 criteria to five, simplifying that, means we can get these sites up and running sooner and we can save lives,” Lake said.