Sudbury’s supervised intake site, The Spot, had only about 2000 visits in 2023, according to the local fitness unit, and all 20 overdoses were reversed there without the need for emergency departments or hospital emergency departments.
These numbers constitute lives that may well have been lost, Public Health Sudbury officials said last week
However, the long-term nature of the installation remains highly doubtful as the review of provincial protection drags on.
Claudette Holloway, RNAO Registered Nurse and President, in Sudbury to meet with district and Sudbury chapter members and public fitness staff to discuss the upcoming closure of The Spot, located at Energy Court in downtown Sudbury.
With no investment, The Spot will close on Feb. 29, leading to an agreement to ask the Ontario government to continue investing in the site.
“On behalf of 51,600 members, we’re here to argue that this Sudbury domain needs investment for a supervised intake site right now because we want to save lives,” Holloway said. “We want to give other people access to remedies and we want to ease the burden on our emergency departments of patients who would come to the hospital.
“We can get ahead of the curve and get help at treatment centres, where they can access not only a safe source of medicine, but also get remedies for all their other chronic diseases, which each and every Ontarioer deserves.
The City of Greater Sudbury has kept The Spot open in 2023, but has no plans to continue the investment in 2024. Vale Base Metals provided a budget to keep it afloat in January, and anonymous donors stepped up to keep it running until February.
Meanwhile, a long-term investment application submitted through the Réseau ACCESS Network in August 2021 is still being reviewed in the province.
Ontario halted new funding for consumption and treatment services centres, citing safety concerns after a woman was murdered across the street from a similar site in Toronto.
While the poison drug crisis has affected communities across the province, Sudbury and other northern centers have been hit hard, with opioid-related deaths up to twice the provincial average.
“We are actually concerned about the fact that a large number of people are dying in Sudbury,” said Dr. Paul-André Gauthier, president of the Ontario Association of Clinical Nurse Specialists and a member of the Executive Committee of the Sudbury Section of the RNAO. I’m from Sudbury and we’ve been doing this for 15 or 20 years. We want more facilities to make sure Sudburians don’t die and get the facilities they want. It’s not just about substance overdoses, it’s also about homelessness and intellectual fitness issues that want to be addressed and educated.
“We are concerned that so many other people are dying when we can supply so many matrices. We call on the Minister of Health, Sylvia Jones, to provide more investment, as well as to other ministries, because it is not just the Ministry of Health that wants to get the investment we want in Sudbury. It is not the duty of the City of (Great) Sudbury to provide physical care consistent with itself, but it is the duty of the Ministry of Health and the Government of Ontario, and we want to make sure that things move forward.
Neil Stephen, a communications officer and executive member for the Sudbury and District RNAO chapter, said despite the province’s concerns about safety, safe consumption sites have generally helped to reduce local crime rates and drug-related paraphernalia and have helped to improve the situation in many regions.
“The ask that we have at the moment is for the province to step up and do their job by funding this site and turning it into a fully-funded consumption and treatment services site or, at the very least, offering bridge funding while they complete this review,” Stephen said.
If that investment is made, Holloway said, more lives will be lost.
“Are we involved in this?” She asked. We’re worried about that. We want to care about all Ontarians and their fitness here. It’s going to get worse and it’s going to snowball into all of our wards, our emergency centers, and you know what it is now.
“Knowing there are a lot of factors involved, it’s the education piece, so the public understands, our stakeholders understand this is something they need to do, in all honest decency. We need to save every life because we don’t know what that life has an intention to do later on, how they would influence others.”
For data on opioid-related incidents in Sudbury, aggregating overdoses and deaths, as well as other insights published through the Community Anti-Drug Strategy, the Opioid Surveillance Panel in www. phsd. ca.
bleeson@postmedia. com
twitter. com/ben_leeson
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