By Margaret Brown
Last August, Bill, a homeless person, was drinking dangerous amounts of alcohol.
Then Dwayne Timmin, a staff member at an alcohol management program, saw him shaking from alcohol withdrawal and invited him to join the program. Bill is now in good health and drinking about half as much.
“If the program shut down completely, I’d be back on the shelter side, basically killing myself,” Bill says.
The program is run out of the Shepherds of Good Hope, located at 233 Murray St., but the people in the program are housed across the street from the main homeless shelter.
The program, which began April 1, 2001, is in danger of closing if funding cannot be renewed by March 31.
The program is part of the larger Ottawa inner city health project which requires $1.4 million to continue operating.
Wendy Muckle, inner city health project director, is trying to get funding from Human Resources Development Canada, since Ontario’s Ministry of Health said in an letter on Feb. 10, that it didn’t have enough money to help.
An evaluation of the program released last December estimated a cost savings of $227, 937 a year because of decreased use of emergency health services.
The federal government provided the approximately $1 million a year to start the pilot project. Muckle is hoping for an extension of that money to give her more time to negotiate with the province.
“Before this program started, there was a least one person a day having alcoholic seizures on the street, even in front of this building,” Bill says.
The management of the alcohol program works by reducing the amount of alcohol that chronic street alcoholics drink, rather than try to stop them drinking completely.
The 18 men and two women in the program are given 142 ml of wine every hour between 7:30 a.m. and 10 p.m. Before entering the program, many were drinking three to four times more fortified sherry or Listerine.
“The goal is not to get people intoxicated, but to make sure that they are maintained at a level where they are comfortable,” says Francine Vachon, senior manager of the program.
“If they were on the streets, most of them would be drinking Listerine,” says Ebenezer Amponsah, a staff member at the program. He says he expects some of the people in the program will never leave because they have no where else to go.
“But one client, Eddie, was drinking through his whole lifetime of 70 years and we were able to ween him off alcohol entirely,” Amponsah says. “Now he’s living in an old age home.”
“Harm reduction is an entirely appropriate name for this program,” Bill says. “It’s not just about alcohol.”
The people in the program also get a place to live, healthy food and regular attention from doctors and nurses.
In the evaluation report, all of the people in the program reported they were drinking less and in better health.
“I could probably muddle through, but a lot of these guys would be dead,” Bill says. “It would be a real shame to see this program shut down because it really does help people.”