The physician recruiter for the Alexandra Marine and General Hospital in Goderich was recently awarded the Jane Chamberlin Award presented on behalf of the Association of General Hospital Psychiatric Services.
Gwen Devereaux, who is also the founder and vice president of the Gateway Centre of Excellence in Rural Health, says the award acknowledges the collaboration of both organizations in the promotion and education of mental health research in Huron and Perth counties. The award was presented at the Ontario Psychiatric Association Conference in Toronto. Devereaux was unable to attend, so her daughter Renee accepted the award for her.
Devereaux says the organizations have done a lot of work with young people and the issues around opioid addiction in Huron and Perth counties.
“We have done some work in youth and the issues around addiction of opioids in Huron and Perth County and we have done some work with injectable, long-acting medication," she says. “The projects that we started last summer with the help of University of Waterloo School of Pharmacy, we will continue working with opioid addiction issues for sure, that's on-going. This will be three, four years since we started working on that project.”
Devereaux says one of the biggest problems now is users have no idea what they might be getting in street drugs so the key is education and getting the message out that nothing is safe anymore.