Doctors have once again opened a pop-up overdose prevention site outside a Victoria hospital, as they push the province to make good on a pledge to incorporate the facilities on hospital grounds.
Tuesday’s event outside Royal Jubilee Hospital was the latest in a string of actions Doctors for Safer Drug Policy have staged on Vancouver Island since November.
Dr. Ryan Herriot, a family physician and addiction medicine doctor who co-founded the group said the province needs to follow through on its pledge to direct health authorities to set up overdose prevention sites in hospitals.
Advocates say hospital-based facilities are needed to serve drug users who may either avoid getting treatment without them or be forced to leave hospital grounds and fatally overdose.
“It helps patients stay in hospital and receive medically necessary care, it helps keep nursing staff safe, and frankly it also helps make the system run more efficiently — an emergency department visit is at least $1,000 minimum, so by preventing readmission it actually makes the system function better for everybody,” Herriot said.
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“This is very much low-hanging fruit if you think about all the things that are needed to stop the toxic drug crisis … this is a low-cost, easy-to-rapidly-implement intervention that would actually save the system money, save lives and so on.”
B.C. Health Minister Josie Osborne said she has met with the doctors and agrees services for drug users are necessary.
But she said the province needs to ensure any program set up in hospitals is done properly.
“People in hospitals need to be safe, too, which is why we have the policies we do and why we are developing minimum service standards for overdose prevention sites,” she said.
“We want to make sure they are thorough, they are done well and that they serve everybody, and then we will have more to say about that.”
Former B.C. chief coroner Lisa Lapointe, who was at the forefront of B.C.’s battle against drug deaths for years, lamented that the issue has become increasingly politicized.
Lapointe said the province hit pause on the hospital sites last April, and has had plenty of time since then to review the plan.
“It has been 10 months they have been working on those standards,” she said. “This is a priority. We are still losing five or six people a day in our province.”
Lapointe said there is no question the province needs to step up with a better drug prevention strategy and accessible treatment.
But in the meantime, she said overdose prevention sites are a critical measure.
“People have to be alive to access those treatments,” she said. “And without overdose prevention sites, we are seeing people die alone in parks and tents and mostly in their own residences.”
The doctors say they will be back at Royal Jubilee Hospital on Wednesday.
