Unique pilot project pairing ER nurses with police is already making a difference on Windsor’s streets
Unique pilot project pairing ER nurses with police is already making a difference on Windsor’s streets
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
This is awesome. The stories they share in the article really go to show that this makes a big difference for helping people. When we talk about police reform, this is the kind of thing we should be advocating, not "defunding"
This is defunding. The funding is taken away from the police and used to hire nurses.
I don't think any funding was removed here. The police already have a budget to work with specialists like mental health professionals and addictions counsellors. I think the experiment here was simply using that same framework for ER nurses.
I don't think the article explicitly says how the program is funded. However, the nurse they highlight "normally works in the emergency department at Windsor Regional Hospital" and they talk about the program also reducing visits to the ER. So, I doubt the WPS is paying the nurse's salary.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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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Does a regular street cop really need 2 pairs of handcuffs and an AR-15 mag strapped to her stomach?
Handcuffs yes. Magazine, no but obviously she had space so, eh? It saves a moment of strapping a bandolier on when you get the trunk gun out and most people probably don't even notice it.