Ottawa Inner City Health

WENDY MUCKLE APPOINTED TO ORDER OF CANADA! Congratulations to our founder, past CEO, mentor, colleague and friend, Wendy Muckle for her much deserved appointment to the Order of Canada today! Wendy started Ottawa Inner City Health with a simple mission—to ensure that unhoused people in Ottawa had the same access to and quality of care as other Canadians. She was also very clear that the problem was not our clients, but the systems that regularly excluded them. Wendy systematically built a system of care around the expressed needs of the unhoused community in Ottawa and included them every step of the way. At the same time she structured Ottawa Inner City Health to be a systems transformation agent to ensure that our clients get the care they need outside our programs. Wendy’s visionary leadership, deep love for the homeless community, strong sense of social justice and human rights, dogged determination and fierce advocacy have fundamentally changed the quality of life and care our most vulnerable citizens receive. In her retirement Wendy continues to volunteer with us to enable people who are unhoused and people who use drugs address public safety concerns in Ottawa’s ByWard Market and Lowertown community. Such deserving recognition for a truly remarkable Canadian! https://lnkd.in/e7hXWUMk #OrderOfCanada  #GGHonours #HarmReduction #Healthcare

Curious about our response to the changes in legislation to supervised consumption sites? Ottawa Inner City Health’s CEO, Rob Boyd was featured on Ottawa Now with Kristy Cameron. For more information, please click the link in our bio. https://lnkd.in/ezDkRSRW

Check out the t-shirts we handed out for HRW Day! Happy Harm Reduction Workers Day from our team to yours! #harmreductionworks #hrw #peersupport

We have failed to match resources to the scale of this crisis and we have not adapted to the changes to the drug supply. So now it is going to be more expensive to take care of people and we need to manage our expectations about their recovery outcomes. #ToxicBrainInjury #SupervisedConsumption #HarmReduction #HighlySupportiveHousing

In Ottawa, the people who use drugs who were engaged in the efforts to protect the health of their community and to advocate for the services they and their community desperately needed to survive the toxic drug crisis are mostly dead now. Those that are not, are overwhelmed with survivor’s guilt, demoralized that not only were their efforts not enough to save their friends but that the services they advocated for are being blamed for causing the problems they set out mitigate. In the public discourse about community safety, the voice of people who use drugs has been absent. This is striking given that people who use drugs a) are part of the community and b) are far more likely to be victimized than any other stakeholder in the conversation and c) necessary for any sustainable solution to public safety issues. We worked with people who use drugs to develop and implement a survey around the safety needs of people who use drugs.  https://lnkd.in/eS3qgiDj Next we held focus groups to ask them what specific things in their current environment are causing them to feel unsafe and how we can address them together. When we talked to people who use drug about the impact of the toxic drug supply, they told us about the dope sickness, they told us about desperation, the fear and the “every person for themselves” attitude that was created. They did not like what had become of their community. They grieved the way things used to be before the drug supply became so toxic, before the pandemic. And they grieved the leaders they loved and respected who have been lost over the past 7 years. So we asked them what they wanted to do about it. What they told us was that they wanted to restore the positive aspects of street culture. That they wanted to be part of the solution to the concerns of neighbours and businesses. They told us that they wanted us to help them to address the things that were impacting their sense of safety. The Ontario Government’s decision to close supervise consumption sites in Ontario was rationalized by concerns about vulnerable children being exposed to drug use and discarded syringes. People who use drugs, many of whom grew up as vulnerable children who the system failed to protect, couldn’t agree more! In fact, the first thing, they wanted to address was addressing drug use in front of kids, and within a week or two they restored the community norm of people shouting “kids up” whenever they saw a family with kids on the block and everyone putting their drugs away until after the family passed by and the kids were out of sight. There are policy alternatives to prohibitionist closures of consumption sites that would restore balance to communities and make safer downtowns for all. #HarmReduction #PublicSafety #DrugPolicy #ToxicDrugPolicy #ToxicDrugCrisis

Want to learn more about the Somerset St West Community Health Centre closure, and the Trailer’s Exemption Extension? Ottawa Inner City Health’s CEO, Rob Boyd was featured on Ottawa Now with Kristy Cameron. For more information, please click the link in our bio. https://lnkd.in/duvwS7Sz.

Today we honour the children who never returned home and those who survived the residential schools as well as their families and their communities. In our work at Ottawa Inner City Health, we are humbled and inspired by the strength and resilience of our indigenous clients.  They teach us every day about the power of culture, community and the indigenous world view. We acknowledge we are doing this work on unceded Algonquin territory. We recognize the Algonquin people have their own traditional ways of healing, and the bio-medical system perpetuates systems of colonialism and cultural assimilation. We commit to honouring a framework of cultural humility and recognize decolonization is not a metaphor; even if it means giving up some privileges that the bio-medical system affords us. #TruthAndReconciliation #CulturalHumility #Decolonization

#truthandreconciliation #everychildmatters #orangeshirtday #harmreductionsaveslives

https://lnkd.in/eK2GbKAy I love this piece by Matthew Bonn. This is what we hope for for people who use drugs…a system that supports them through their self directed journey to wherever it is they want to go and who they want to be. Discovery > Recovery This is achievable for everyone but it requires a radical restructuring of our disempowering and stigmatizing approach to substance use health. #SubstanceUse #HarmReduction

Like many of you, I read about the deadly assaults that took place out of Kingston’s Integrated Care Hub with horror and dread. I feel horror about the terrible, violent loss of life and the impact that these deaths will have on the community of people living in the encampment, on the loved ones of those who have passed in such a horrible way, on those who responded to the emergency who are people who hold a deep passion and empathy for the people they serve. And I feel dread about the potential policy response to this terrible incident. The hull has been breached, the ship is going down and people have fallen overboard.   Our leaky lifeboats are at risk of being swamped by the desperate needs of those in the water. Those that can swim are doing what they can, those that cling to bits of wreckage are making as much space as possible for others. While it is hard for bystanders to hear the screams for help, those screams will not stop because the people in the water are survivors, clinging to whatever hope they can for rescue. So, what should be our response? We have deployed a few leaky lifeboats like supervised consumption services and prescribed alternatives to the toxic drug supply, and we support those who manage to find refuge in the flotsam and jetsam of tents and encampments and other public spaces, building community under the direst of circumstances.  They do this because they understand that their chances of survival are better if they stick together. I am filled with dread because there is an ill-informed public debate about how to “save” people from this disaster. Some offer the unhelpful observation that it would be better if everyone could swim (i.e. go into “treatment”), others suggest our time would be better spend designing better lifeboats or new shipping routes, some suggest that we solve the problem of our existing leaky boats by scuttling them--closing consumption sites, disbanding encampments, prohibiting prescribed alternatives with their wraparound supports. In sea rescues, crews are taught to put all their efforts into pulling as many people out of the water as possible—and then the sea will take the rest. We know these are not perfect solutions but these are resources we have been given, despite calls for more.  We must deploy them to save as many people as possible. We cannot rescue everyone but we can, and should, be rescuing as many people as possible because time is running out for far too many. #HarmReduction #SupervisedConsumption #DrugPolicyFail #HousingCrisis #RescueMission