PLAN TO HELP HOMELESS

Mission, hospital join forces to aid those in crisis

Windsor Regional Hospital and the Downtown Mission of Windsor unveiled a new strategy Friday to help homeless patients being discharged from the emergency department.

The unique program that may be the first like it in Canada will have mission employees in the ER to help patients who don’t have a place to stay or may be struggling with addictions or mental-health issues. The employees can call a cab or take the patient to the mission if needed that night and follow up with them so they don’t end up back in the ER.

“We are ground zero for all three of those crises,” mission executive director Ron Dunn said Friday of the homeless, opioid and mentalhealth crises. “I’m not going to lie. This has been a tough year for us. It’s been a tough year with the opioid crisis losing lots of friends and people we care about.” In November, a mission employee for more than 13 years died from a drug overdose when there were four Windsor deaths in a 24-hour period.

Beginning Monday, the mission will have two staff members called Mission Navigators, including one who will work mostly out of the Ouellette campus ER from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. weekdays and alternating weekends, and one at the downtown mission. A navigator will be at the Met campus when necessary.

The navigator who has used the mission’s services can tell the person about its Phoenix Recovery and Wellness Program if an addiction is an issue, get them to the mission for the night if they are homeless or help them get connected to other services they need. “I really don’t think that this is a model that is used elsewhere extensively,” said Windsor Regional Hospital CEO David Musyj. In 2016-2017 the hospital ER had more than 2,000 visits from people who were homeless, Musyj said. The visits came from about 300 people but added up as half of them came five times a year and five per cent of them came 11 or more times a year. It was up to six ER visits a day, he said.

That statistic of 300 homeless people helped at the ER has likely increased to 400 to 500 people a year, Musyj said.

It’s difficult for these patients to follow up on care so a cut on the leg can turn into an infection and another visit to the ER and maybe hospitalization. “Time is of the essence for our community” Musyj said. “We’re very positive this is going to have results, but it’s one piece of the puzzle.”

At the end of Friday’s press conference, Musyj presented Dunn with $713.35 hospital staff had raised for the mission at a holiday gathering.