Alberta Hospital closure worries police commission

Members of the Edmonton Police Commission asked health officials pointed questions Thursday about how patients affected by the closure of 246 beds at Alberta Hospital will be integrated into the community.

"There hasn't been enough transparency. There hasn't been enough consultation," commissioner Murray Billett said oflast month's decision to close acute-care beds at the psychiatric hospital.

"Can you explain to us how you're going to prepare the people that you're moving when they move out to integrate onto the streets so we aren't going to be having our calls for service going through the roof and our emergency departments overflowing?" Billet asked.

The province plans to move the patients affected by the bed closure into community-based options over the next three years. However, at Thursday's meeting, Alberta Health Services confirmed it hasn't yet come up with a plan.

"We're going to have to build those places. They don't exist right now," Mark Snaterse, the health service's Edmonton executive director of addiction and mental health, told the commissioners.

He acknowledged that transitions of patients into community care weren't handled well in the past. But he said that won't happen this time. "We realize now that we need to create programs and supports that don't exist and have never existed in our area."

On Wednesday, AHS announced it will move more than 100 geriatric mental health patients to Villa Caritas, which will open in west Edmonton next year.

Snaterse was joined at the meeting by Marianne Stewart, Edmonton vice-president of Alberta Health Services, who insisted no one would fall within the cracks.

"No one will move if there's not a place or a bed," she said.

But Billett didn't appear to be convinced by these reassurances. Of the 100,000 calls for police services withinsix months, he estimated about one-third of them relate to mental-health issues, referring to estimates made by Vancouver's Police Service that Edmonton uses as a benchmark.

He worried that health officials were in a "frantic rush" to push through their plan and were only doing community consultation after the fact.

"It's not ... the acutely ill that I'm concerned about. It's the rest that are going to fall through the cracks." Billet said. "It's the people that are going to be in these other facilities that are going to be on the streets."

Billet's worries were shared by fellow commissioner Dennis Anderson, an advocate for mental health issues. Anderson worried about the cumulative effects of recently announced cuts on a system already short of resources.

"It's the backup in the system that will cause the pressure on our policing service, on our community resources, and it's not just this move," he said. "It is the Boys and Girls' Club cuts and the cuts at Bosco Homes that will all put that pressure on, in my opinion, this service, this commission, this community."