She won't save teen treatment program, but minister vows there will be `no gaps'
B.C.'s minister for mental health and addictions will not step in to stop the closure of a unique threeweek residential program for teens with addictions and mental-health issues.
The program will close after it treats the nine remaining children on its waiting list. The 10-bed Carlile Youth Concurrent Disorders Centre at Lions Gate Hospital in North Vancouver has cared for youth ages 13 to 18 for seven years, and its closure will leave the large region served by Vancouver Coastal Health with no in-patient adolescent psychiatric beds.
In response to several Postmedia News stories that revealed the health authority planned to quietly shutter the facility, Minister Jennifer Whiteside said Tuesday she has directed officials to ensure there will be no “gaps in services” for adolescent patients.
“My expectation is that we don't leave a single one of those younger youth (without services),” Whiteside said, but didn't provide specifics of how that would be achieved. “That is what the health authority is working on right now to ensure that there are no gaps for that younger cohort.”
Postmedia hadn't heard by deadline from Vancouver Coastal Health about how it will replace the work done at the centre, the only one of its kind in Western Canada, which offered youth daily school classes, life skills training and access to medical professionals.
Squamish mother Sheila Quinn said she cried when she heard the Carlile will stop operating, as her son Aidan went there twice in 2022 when he was 16 years old.
“It's way too important of a program to close it down. And Aiden agrees. He doesn't know where he'd be if he hadn't had the opportunity to go there,” said Quinn, who added Aidan, now 19, is working as a cook and doing well.
“I really truly believe that they saved his life.”
When the Carlile closes, the health authority will have nothing similar to offer youth in its region, which stretches from Richmond to the Sea to Sky corridor to Bella Bella.
Whiteside said there are 26 beds at B.C. Children's Hospital, a provincial facility that serves all of B.C., for youth in “acute distress.” There are residential community resources for other youth with mental health and addiction issues, she said, listing Peak House, Youth Haven and Young Bears Lodge, all in Vancouver.
But Maria Martin, who represents four Indigenous communities on the Central Coast and is on the First Nations Health Council, said there aren't enough local services in towns like Bella Bella to treat young people, and that the Carlile shutting down will leave their youth with “nowhere to go.”
“(The Carlile) does remain an integral part of providing the addictions and mental-health needs that just aren't on the ground here,” she said Tuesday. “Quite honestly, we have not been provided a backup plan of another facility. Where is the access of service going to be? It is the only outside external resource that is accessible.”
Whiteside acknowledged “there's much more that needs to be done” to ensure rural youth have sufficient community resources so they don't have to travel to a city for help, such as hiring more clinicians to work in remote areas.
Carlile's closure will leave teens, regardless of where they live, without access to the full slate of wraparound services that prepared them for success after being discharged. Whiteside, though, argued it's increasingly hard to find adolescents to voluntarily enter residential programs and keep them full.
However, several experts, who couldn't be identified to avoid compromising their employment, said Carlile's capacity issues were often due to a shortage of staff and a refusal by the health authority to allow them to treat youth with a mental illness or a drug addiction, instead requiring patients to have both.
Supporters said Tuesday they worry about large gaps in service after the Carlile closes, a dire prognosis when B.C. is mired in a toxic drug crisis and increasing mental-health diagnoses.