Interior Health has announced its plans to apply for a mobile supervised consumption site for both Kamloops and Kelowna.
The application to Health Canada will be submitted by the end of January, but it’s not known how long the federal government will take to make a decision.
A supervised consumption site, or safe injection site as it’s sometimes known, is a safe space for people to inject or consume drugs under the medical supervision of a trained nurse. The proposed mobile units would also provide support and other health-care services in an outreach model.
The health authority has chosen the mobile unit for Kelowna over the previously proposed site on Leon Avenue. At a press conference on Friday, Medical Health Officer Dr. Silvina Mema said more support for the mobile unit from stakeholders and the public, and its advantages led to the decision.
“The hot spots for drug use is more than one place, so downtown Kelowna, Rutland are areas where drugs are causing deaths in higher numbers, so a mobile would provide the benefit that it could be used from one location to another,” she said “in addition to that we have to think that in the health authority there are other towns and other places where we could deploy the mobile if needed”.
Interior Health clarified that it was never intending to open both a mobile unit and a standalone site in Kelowna.
The health authority is already planning to offer some sort of outreach mobile service as part of its harm reduction strategy, so the application is for an exemption to be able to allow drug use in the mobile unit. Interior Health believes the supervised consumption site on wheels would be a first in Canada.
Two people, including a nurse, would staff the unit which would operate from noon until midnight, Tuesday to Saturday. Other details such as how the mobile unit would look like and where it would make stops are still being worked out.
At the end of last year, Interior Health opened one of two planned overdose prevention sites at the former Kelowna Health Centre on Ellis St. Mema said it's slowly seeing an increase in use.
"It had a slow start because that building is not the natural place where peers or people who use drugs go to for services, so it started slow,” she said “but now we are seeing that people are going and they’re using the service there, so that’s great news and that speaks to building the trust and the relationship”.
Interior Health is still looking to open an overdose prevention site in Rutland, after plans to open one at the Living Positive Resource Centre were axed because of concerns from tenants.
The growing opioid crisis claimed 126 lives in the Interior Health Authority from January to November of last year. 40 of those deaths were in Kelowna.