Listen to thisTwo months after Keremeos facility closes, there’s still no replacement
Everyone agrees that there’s an urgent need for more youth addiction treatment in B.C., and more kinds of treatment. Yet once again, British Columbia is the only province other than Newfoundland that has no long-term residential treatment for kids with addictions.
For six years, B.C. had a facility. But at the end of February, the Provincial Health Services Authority shut British Columbia’s only long-term residential treatment centre.
After months of negotiations, it couldn’t reach agreement with Portage, a Quebec based non-profit that had operated The Crossing at Keremeos for six years. PHSA “transitioned” 22 youth – boys and girls – from The Crossing into other treatment programs near their home communities. With no operator, PHSA handed back the keys to the property owner, Central City Foundation.
Now, more than two months later, The Crossing sits empty and British Columbia has 42 fewer spaces for youth treatment.
Yet even before the closure, everyone agreed there was a shortage of treatment for B.C. kids and an urgent and pressing need here for more.
The Crossing opened in 2009 after Central City raised $6.5 million to buy the 58-acre site. Central City then provided the property and buildings rent-free to the government to run as a therapeutic community for kids aged 13 to 18. Over the past six years, more than 400 kids have gone through The Crossing for help; close to 45 per cent completed the program; and, six to 18 months later, 88 per cent of them were still clean and sober.
Now, Central City and the province seem to be at an impasse.
“We’re trying hard to get it reopened,” says Central City’s president and CEO Jennifer Johnstone. “I’m not looking for an operator, but we are keeping the site ready to go and we’re trying to have a conversation with the government to come back with the operating funds … What this needs is for the government to come back to the table because I feel strongly that we have kept up our side of the bargain.”
Meantime, over at PHSA, “We certainly understand that there is an urgent need,” says Connie Coniglio, executive director of children’s and women’s mental health and substance use programs. “It will not take years to sort out. We hope to move forward quickly after discussing this with stakeholders and families. This is a top priority for us.”
PHSA, however, doesn’t seem to include Central City as a “stakeholder.”
“They (Central City) own the property. I imagine that they will look at appropriate options for how to use it. There are appropriate options,” Coniglio said. “It was used by Outward Bound before.”
She said PHSA is working on “an enhanced model of care” that would have more clinical staff, enhanced psychiatric support and more nurses than the peer-based model used by Portage.
(Coniglio insisted that there was “no defining event” that caused the break with Portage and that “everyone worked hard and in good faith” to try to reach a new agreement. However, she wouldn't say why it wasn’t possible to get a new contract to replace the old one that was worth $2.5 million a year.)
Moving forward, Coniglio said, “Our highest priority is high-quality care using the most effective, evidence-based models.”
But Johnstone believes the evidence from The Crossing’s six years of operation is clear. That model works.
It’s not a model that works for everybody. But even addictions specialists who use other methods agree that there is no single model that does.
Since The Crossing has closed, Johnstone says not only have donors and former residents been calling, she and her staff are fielding calls from desperate parents all across the province looking for help for their children. Because the closure has made a bad situation worse.
“Any loss of services in the youth sector is difficult. Any loss is impactful,” says James Kelly, the executive director of Peak House in Vancouver, which runs a 10-week residential treatment program for girls and boys aged 13 to 18.
There’s not a single youth facility in B.C. that isn’t full all the time and it’s rare that they don’t have waiting lists as well. It’s not hyperbole to say that children are dying because they can’t get the treatment they need when they need it. Everyone agrees the demands are huge and the need for residential treatment is urgent.
So, could somebody – other than desperate parents and kids – pick up the phone. We need to have all this talk of urgency turned into action.
Daphne Bramham
13 May 2015
