The organizers of Brightshores Health Systems new Wellness and Recovery Centre told Bruce County council that the innovative facility has helped reduce the total visits for substance use at area hospitals in its first year.
In a presentation to council on Thursday, Naomi Vodden, Director of Mental Health and Addictions Services at Brightshores, thanked the county for financially supporting their modern approach to treating addiction.
"We were the first program with this model," said Vodden. "The main difference is that you don't have to be ready for treatment. We know that a lot of our clients aren't ready for treatment and there was no way to capture them. They would come to us, they would get put on a waitlist and often times by the times they got the bed in two to three months, they were no longer ready for treatment."
Vodden told council that the 45-bed facility has had 100 per cent occupancy, and that there have been more than 33,000 outpatient visits to access service at the centre. Successes over the first year included helping 31 clients that are homeless get discharged with stable housing and seeing over 200 clients finish their individualized treatment plan.
Vodden said the province has even modeled 19 new Homeless and Addiction Recovery Treatment (HART) Hubs on how the centre operates.
"The first set of data has been very supportive to our model and as such, 19 HART hubs have been funded across Ontario. They've been at our place many times to see our model, our facility and the work that we do," she said.
Because the centre was the first centre of its kind, there was interest from as far as Guelph and Kitchener when it opened last summer. She said the waitlist is now around 45 after hitting as many as 65.
"The thing we've done really well is that waitlist management. We've triaged people: Indigenous first and Grey and Bruce second. Unfortunately that has meant we are closed to people outside the area because we have a list of 45 people. But those 45 people are not just waiting out there without service."
She said 80 per cent of people on the waitlist are attending virtual treatment or in-person electives.