In the first year of the pilot operation, nurse-police pairs handled 1,786 calls for service, treated 129 drug-use-related wounds in the community and diverted 608 potential visits to the ER
Nurse Abbas Haidar and his Windsor Police partner were nearing the end of their shift when a group of panicked teenagers burst from an alley and ran toward their cop car.
The goal was to divert patients with mental illness and substance-use struggles from the city’s two overwhelmed emergency departments by offering them medical care on the streets, with police on hand to keep the nurses safe.
Armed with a list of frequent ER visitors with mental-health challenges, the nurse-police pairs pro-actively offered them medical care and social-service referrals, cutting their trips to the emergency department nearly in half over the 30 days after their interaction with the team.
At the same event, the chief said two long-standing programs pairing police officers with social workers from another local hospital, Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare, would be merged into a Crisis Response Team.
Windsor, like many places in Canada, has been forced to rethink how it provides policing and health care services amid rising homelessness and a mental-health and addictions crisis that has grown worse since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hospital brass vowed to expedite care for people experiencing mental-health crises, beginning with code announcements that treated patients in mental distress with the same urgency as those with serious physical injuries.
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Nurse Abbas Haidar and his Windsor Police partner were nearing the end of their shift when a group of panicked teenagers burst from an alley and ran toward their cop car.
The goal was to divert patients with mental illness and substance-use struggles from the city’s two overwhelmed emergency departments by offering them medical care on the streets, with police on hand to keep the nurses safe.
Armed with a list of frequent ER visitors with mental-health challenges, the nurse-police pairs pro-actively offered them medical care and social-service referrals, cutting their trips to the emergency department nearly in half over the 30 days after their interaction with the team.
At the same event, the chief said two long-standing programs pairing police officers with social workers from another local hospital, Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare, would be merged into a Crisis Response Team.
Windsor, like many places in Canada, has been forced to rethink how it provides policing and health care services amid rising homelessness and a mental-health and addictions crisis that has grown worse since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hospital brass vowed to expedite care for people experiencing mental-health crises, beginning with code announcements that treated patients in mental distress with the same urgency as those with serious physical injuries.
The original article contains 1,927 words, the summary contains 207 words. Saved 89%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!