A new health program targetting Ottawa’s homeless has been more successful than anticipated, one organizer says.
TED, which stands for Targeted Engagement and Diversion, is a program that aims to divert homeless people away from the emergency department by providing them with hospital services based in the community.
The program, which started in January, is a joint effort between Ottawa Hospital and Ottawa Inner City Health.
“It is hard to evaluate a program, it usually has to be running for a couple of years before we can get an idea,” says Wendy Muckle, executive director of Ottawa Inner City Health. “Already we are finding TED to be much more successful than we thought it was going to be."
“Our target for the whole year was 120 people and we already served 280 people in the first six months of the program,” she says.
TED focuses mainly on helping those who are homeless and struggling with addiction and mental health problems.
“They are a subset of a group of people, a very small section of the overall population,” Muckle says, “but these are the people who are most severely impacted and the people for whom the traditional systems of care were not working.”
Inner City Health works with police and hospitals to compile a list of those who are in the greatest crisis and in most need of help.
“There are social determinants of health,” says Sue Ward, a social worker at the Ottawa Hospital’s emergency department. “As social workers, we study this, and certain social groups are more susceptible to illness and will get sick more easily. People who are homeless or at risk of being homeless are more likely to become ill than the average person."
“We get a lot of homeless people struggling with addiction or mental health problems. They are familiar faces in the emergency department. 30 per cent of health-care money goes to one per cent of the population. A lot of them are homeless,” she says.
Jeff Turnbull, chief of staff at the Ottawa Hospital and the medical director of Ottawa Inner City Health, has been working in homeless shelters for 15 years. He says the TED programme is essential.
“The reaction has been a very good one. The homeless population said they finally have a place they can go,” he says. “They did not like being taken to the hospital by ambulance or by the police if they are intoxicated – only to stay on a stretcher and then be sent back to the city. This process does not serve their needs.”
The program frees up ambulances and police cars from taking intoxicated people to the hospital and waiting with them, giving them more time to deal with other emergencies.
“In the few months this has been running we have dramatically reduced the frequency of these individuals using inappropriate services,” says Turnbull.