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Chatham

Erie St. Clair LHIN Tackling Opioid Crisis

The Erie St. Clair Local Health Integration Network is using government funding to provide more hospital support and rehabilitative care.

The Ministry of Health has provided the Erie St. Clair LHIN with $1-million in funding for opioid addiction and overdose initiatives, as well as $1.75-million towards short-term rehabilitative and transitional care.

CEO Ralph Ganter says there may be a whole variety of reasons the region prescribes so many opioids.

"If you look at some of the characteristics of our population, we have lots of orthopedic issues that comes with lots of pain, pain management, back problems, and so forth. That's one element of it. Being on a border community as well, there's probably access to opioids in a number of different ways," explains Ganter.

The ministry funding will be allocated towards the following opiod initiatives:

  • $200,000 towards Hotel Dieu Grace Health Care in Windsor for community withdrawal management services, which will include a rotation of staff between the three emergency departments. The staff will also facilitate opioid patients' access to Rapid Access Addiction Medicine Clinics (RAAM) in the Windsor and Leamington area.
  • $175,000 towards the Windsor-Essex Community Health Centre's Harm Reduction Community Outreach Workers, which aims to provide clients that are living in homeless shelters, on the streets, recently released from jails, and other unstable situations.
  • $80,000 towards the Chatham-Kent Health Alliance's CK crisis services and supports in emergency departments. Withdrawal Management Services staff will have a direct relationship with the RAAM Clinic as well.
  • $100,000 towards the Victoria Order of Nurses for Opioid Case Managers in the Pain Clinic Program.
  • $445,000 to Bluewater Health in Sarnia for temporary withdrawal management beds.
Funding for short-term transitional care models will provide more clients with access to the following programs and rehabilitative facilities:
  • Assisted Living Southwestern Ontario
  • March of Dimes Chatham-Kent and Sarnia-Lambton
  • Home and Community Care for Chatham-Kent, Sarnia-Lambton, and Windsor-Essex.
Ganter says it's important to provide support within the hospitals and look into more guidelines at prescribing opioids. Though, he says these rehabilitative programs are a vital next step.

"To actually have people transition to community programs, it's really valuable. You've got the expertise in the community, they're linked with primary care... and what it does is it takes pressure off hospitals to do things that they really want to spend more time on," says Ganter.

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