Overdose Emergency Response Centre opens at VGH
BC’s first Overdose Emergency Response Centre (OERC) is now open at Vancouver General Hospital. Dr. Patricia Daly, chief medical health officer for Vancouver Coastal Health, is serving as the centre’s executive director and clinical lead. Miranda Compton has been seconded as the director.
The team
A core team of experts and full-time staff at the emergency response centre will bring together provincial, health authority, municipal, Indigenous and law enforcement resources to tackle the overdose crisis at a community level. To maximize local impact, the centre will work closely with five new regional response teams to co-ordinate and strengthen addiction and overdose prevention programs on the ground with local teams.
This escalated emergency response strategy draws together and co-ordinates many partners – at the community, regional and provincial levels – with a common determination to save lives. Dr. Patricia Daly
The priorities
- Proactively identifying and supporting people at risk of overdose – including screening for drug use by health-care providers, clinical followup for people at risk, fast-tracked pathways to treatment and care, and connection to social supports like housing.
- Addressing the unsafe drug supply through wider access to drug checking and substitution drug treatment, such as Suboxone and hydromorphone.
- Expanding community-based harm reduction services, such as supervised consumption and overdose prevention sites, and outreach and mobile programs that extend the reach of harm reduction services.
- Increasing availability of naloxone at the community level, and those trained to use the life-saving treatment.
Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, Judy Darcy, along with provincial health officer Dr. Perry Kendall, Dr. Daly and others officially opened the Overdose Emergency Response Centre December 1st. In the crowd were John and Jennifer Hedican of Courtenay, BC, who urged health care leaders and politicians to be more proactive, rather than reactive.
Our 26-year-old son Ryan Hedican lost his life to a fentanyl poisoning, not an overdose. John & Jennifer Hedican
The Hedicans’ explained how their son chose to do drugs, but did not choose to be addicted. Minister Darcy recognized that the overdose crisis is devastating families like the Hedicans’ and that is why the response must be escalated.