Local CMHA executive director Lyndon Grunewald speaks at Monday's city council meeting.--NEWS PHOTO
cgallant@medicinehatnews.com@CollinGallant
A local program that diverts police calls to mental health workers is working but won’t have any provincial funding to continue as of Sept. 1, the head of initiative told city council on Monday.
The Community Assisted Response (CARe) team has been operated by the local Canadian Mental Health Association office since last September when it received a one-time $451,000 grant to hire staff to work in conjunction with local police.
They respond to “low risk” calls for mental health and welfare checks, diverting 800 such cases off the plate of officers over nine months.
Local CMHA executive director Lyndon Grunewald said however, that extending the program will require city financial support since requests to the province for money to extend or make permanent what was a pilot project have been denied.
That includes a proposal by CMHA to set up similar programs in other mid-sized cities, “where the data we’ve collected suggests it can work very well.”
“I believe that there is a shared responsibility and it should be jointly funded,” said Grunewald in a presentation to council on Monday night.
His group is asking the city to take over funding the $451,000 annual cost of the program while discussions with CMHA Alberta and various ministries continue.
With three months remaining however, he is looking for financial assurance to keep his unit operating in Medicine Hat.
Council members said they support the goals of the group and applaud the results, but questioned what level of the support city should provide considering it already puts $25 million in to the annual police budget, while health and mental health is a provincial responsibility.
Council voted to have staff consider the funding request while directing them to lobby the province on turning their support into further funding.
“The question is where is the provincial government on this, because this was a priority issue for them during the election,” said Coun. Andy McGrogan.
Coun. Darren Hirsch said the responsibilities of municipalities are expanding while funding is shrinking, and too often he has seen valuable pilot projects cancelled after the initial phase despite success.
“Frankly, we have a couple of newly minted MLAs, and if they want a flag to carry, this might be it,” he said.
Mental health, addictions training and urban crime were all marquee issues for the Untied Conservative Party’s re-election campaign.
Early this year, Premier Danielle Smith told the News the results of a pilot project bringing Alberta Sheriff officers to downtown Calgary and Edmonton could be expanded to smaller cities.
That would deal with highly visible drug use in big city centres, she said, and create a “continuity of care” that she said would better connect municipal police officers with provincially run health and addiction efforts.
The Calgary and Edmonton programs were launched in February and are now coming to a conclusion.
In Medicine Hat, figures presented by Grunewald show mental health and addiction problems thought to be centred in Medicine Hat’s downtown are actually happening all over the city.
The mid-year statistics also show case volumes are almost 50 per cent higher than expected for the team, which will likely divert 1,200 calls from the city’s police officers to a team of seven mental health professionals that is staffed 24 hours a day.
It was created with a one-time $450,000 grant from the Government of Alberta’s Civic Society Fund.
An original projection forecast high-call areas as downtown Medicine Hat and North River Flats. Actual data shows little call volume in the core but high numbers along Kingsway Avenue and the Southeast Hill, the entire Flats and similar callouts to Southview, South Ridge, Ross Glen and isolated sections of northeast and northwest Crescent Heights.
“It is really great data … 60 per cent of our calls are from residences, and the remainder (involving) unhoused populations,” he said.
The group also saw a similar number of clients with Redcliff addresses, though calls to 911 emanated inside city limits.
The unit dealt with an average of 24 calls per week, or 3.4 per day over 245 days, and spent a total of about 650 hours on scenes.
On an annual basis, the number of calls logged by the city’s 911 system related to mental health or intoxicated persons remain level from 2019 to 2021, rising from 1,168 to 1,224 over three years. But, when additional calls related to “welfare checks” were added to the final year of data, the figure rises by half to 1,975.
From September 2022 to March 2023, the program diverted about 900 calls considered low to moderate risk mental health or addictions inquiries to the CARe team and away from officers.
