The City of Quesnel has received a much needed grant to help address the overdose crisis in the community.
Mayor Bob Simpson confirms that they have received a Community Innovation grant worth 75-thousand dollars.
He says it will help them to take an action plan that was developed with their Community Caring for People with Addiction committee, and move into implementation by hiring a person who can help to do that…
“And that’s to increase services to individuals with addictions, to get more collaboration and coordination services, and then to begin to really work in our community to target specific areas where we have needs and individuals in our communities have needs, to make sure that we’ve got the right service delivery model for them.”
Simpson says another part of the funding will be used to get some peers who are currently stabilized in their addictions…
“They have that sense of who is on the street, and then can relate to individuals at the street level to gather more intelligence for us on a peer to peer basis to make sure that the strategy that we have makes sense to the individuals its targeted for, so it’s pretty exciting for us to be able to have a resource like this come at this time.”
Simpson says they will also be able to utilize some of the existing resources and existing community groups that are already doing this kind of work…
“Part of what we’re doing is trying to marshal the current resources that we have, so for example as part of the process to date, the group has worked with Seasons House and Northern Health to move the methadone clinic out of the Seasons House shelter over to the Grace Young facility, and to actually increase the methadone treatment capabilities with what Seasons House was running with some Northern Health doctors. We’re finding that model works really well and has been adapted to deal with individuals who are in crisis on a no appointment basis. So we’ve already, if you will, leveraged some existing resources and some additional resources to provide a new level of service in the community by simply collaborating together in a different way.”