Police await return of nurses

By Graeme McNaughton/The Oshawa Express

Durham police are working to get mental health nurses back in cruisers.

The force initially had a memorandum of understanding with Durham Mental Health Services – however, that deal was terminated in the fall. Now, police are seeking to get nurses back, this time from Lakeridge Health.

Police Chief Paul Martin says that negotiations are currently ongoing with the Central East Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) on funding for the return of the program. The top priority, Martin says, is to return services back to where they were before.

“We were having some ongoing discussions. We talked with the Central East LHIN back in the fall…and we expressed and we had agreement that the first priority was to get the nurses back into at least the service level that we had before,” Martin tells The Oshawa Express.

“With a transition from Durham Mental Health Services to Lakeridge Health, it’s just an issue of getting the nurses in place.”

Under the old program, two nurses from Durham Mental Health Services (DMHS) would accompany two plain clothes officers for mental health-related calls and help provide specialized services, such as diverting them away from emergency rooms. According to a report presented to the Durham Police Services Board in October, the team was responsible for diverting 299 people from Lakeridge Health Oshawa, 18 from Rouge Valley Hospital and 27 from other facilities between September 2015 and the end of August 2016 – meaning that these people were taken to more specialized services and helping prevent making an emergency room even busier.

As for why the deal between DRPS and DMHS was cut, Dave Selby, a spokesperson for the police, says that it was a decision made after DRPS reviewed what it had with the group and wanted to improve the program.

“We conducted a detailed review of the unit in 2016 in terms of efficiency and effectiveness and determined that improvements could be made to better serve the public,” Selby tells The Oshawa Express in an emailed statement.

“We continue to work with a number of agencies in the mental health field in developing this new model so we can improve and enhance the service we provide. The new model will also involve nurses teaming up with specially-trained police officers in mobile response teams. Durham Mental Health Services will remain an important community partner and a vital referral agency for us going forward.”

In addition to bringing the nurses back into the fold, Martin says DRPS is working to train more of its officers in how to properly deal with mental health calls, sending some for specialized training.

“We give them some extra training. I don’t want to say how many days it is, but we give some enhanced training for frontline officers. We give some enhanced training to our officers to recognize people suffering from mental health issues and some tools to help address it as well,” he says.

“We try to avoid those confrontations that become critical and sometimes fatal, depending on the situation. We’ve trained (181) officers, given them that enhanced training, because we are seeing a significant increase in mental health related calls across the region year over year, and it’s not going away any time soon. We want to make sure that our frontline officers are equipped as well as we can.”

Martin says he expects plans for having mental health nurses return should be ready by the end of the month.