While the doors at the SafePoint consumption and treatment site in downtown Windsor remain closed, health officials are optimistic they could be back open soon.
In the meantime the Windsor-Essex County Health Unit, in collaboration with the SafePoint Advisory Committee, prepared and implemented a mitigation plan for the pause in services to support clients and the community throughout the period of transition.
At the first WECHU board meeting of 2024 on Thursday, officials discussed the plans and their latest understanding about the province's ongoing critical incident review.
Members of the WECHU board meeting for the first time in 2024 (photo taken by AM800's Aaron Mahoney)
The province announced in early October that the government was pausing approval of new supervised consumption and treatment sites until completing the review.
Plans were developed, in collaboration with Family Services Windsor-Essex to increase the availability of outreach supports in the areas surrounding SafePoint in the early months of 2024.
Additionally, the Mobile Outreach Support Team van will be making nightly stops near SafePoint until the end of March to look out for people seeking the services of SafePoint and to provide harm reduction supplies and referrals to community services
Eric Nadalin, Program Director at WECHU, says while the site itself remains closed they want to be able to provide help to their clients.
"The mitigation strategies that we've put in place, in partnership with all of the partners that have come together to initiate and operate the service as it begins, started with meeting with our regular clients at SafePoint. And we have a lot of credit to our partners at Hotel Dieu Grace Healthcare, who are operating leads of the site, they met with those frequent visitors of the site and talked through what the next few months might look like," he said.
Nadalin says they still haven't heard anything from the Ministry of Health on their current application.
"At this point in time, as we stand here today, it continues to be on hold. Certainly we're optimistic that we hear soon about the results of their provincial review and get some good news about the future of the site. It is there ready to operate, and so we're hopeful to hear something in the near future but no indications at this point in time."
Based on monitoring of media reports around the province, he says they're hearing the investigation into the site in Toronto that sparked the reviews could be wrapping up within a few months.
March was mentioned as a possibility, and while they're hopeful, Nadalin says they will wait to hear officially.
"Just monitoring different media reports and what we hear from our partners on where they're at in the process. We continue to be optimistic, I think the community has recognized the importance of the service. I think we've demonstrated that the site can operate safely and can help a lot of people, so we're optimistic that we hear soon but we have no indication directly from the ministry on that," he said.
SafePoint operated for a period of eight months, recording a total of 1,257 client visits amongst 248 unique clients.
While services at the site are paused, officials say ongoing communication will be maintained with the MOH for updates regarding the status of the WECHU’s CTS application, provincial funding, and a potential re-opening under the CTS model.