Photo: Naloxone Kit Photo Credit: Doreen Nicoll
Shelter Health Network is an amazing team composed of 29 family physicians, an internist, 4 psychiatrists. They also partner with 4 nurse practitioners, 2 registered nurses and a team of midwives.
Today, I’m in conversation with Dr. Kerry Beal, Lead Physician of Shelter Health Network and this is one podcast that you will definitely want to listen to.
Team members and partners work at several different clinics located inside shelters, transition housing programs, drop-in centres, addiction and mental health facilities, but they also meet people where they are like in local parks.
Shelter Health Network also distibutes Naloxone kits throughout the community. Some readers may be more familiar with the brand name Narcan.
Naloxone reverses the effects of opioid overdose by restoring normal breathing within minutes. And, that can mean the difference between life and death while waiting for paramedics to arrive.
Until recently, agencies like Shelter Health Network could get the opioid antagonist from pharmacies as well as from Hamilton Public Heath Services.
According to Hamilton Public Health, in the first 6 months of 2023, pharmacies gave out nearly 31,000 doses of Naloxone to both individuals and organizations like Shelter Health Network.
However, access to Naloxone kits was suddenly cut off by the Ford government on February 9, 2024. That’s when the Ford government changed the rules around how pharmacies submit claims for reimbursement of the kits they hand out.
Shelter Health was one of the organizations that was no longer able to obtain bulk Naloxone kits from pharmacies under the Ontario Naloxone Programs for Pharmacies (ONPP).
It was February 22nd -- just before the end of the month when benefit cheques arrive and overdoes spike -- that Public Health sent out a form to organizations like Shelter Health Network to have them sign up to qualify for Naloxone kits. After completing the application Shelter Health Network was informed that because it was not incorporated, they could not get Naloxone kits from Public Health.
The Ontario Ministry of Health claims that these changes were not intended to reduce access to Naloxone kits. That may be true, but while the kits remain available through Canadian Addiction treatment Centres and from Hamilton Public Health, on-the-ground providers like Shelter Health Network no longer qualify.
Currently, Shelter Health Network can get 2 kits from any given pharmacy. There are also restrictions around access from addiction treatment centres and Public Health.
It’s really important to understand that the Ford government has put these hurdles in place while Hamilton is experiencing an opioid-related death rate that is 63% higher than the provincial average (2022).
In 2023, Hamilton city council declared opioid addiction a state of emergency. I would argue, it’s really an opioid crisis.
Due to changes in the street drug supply, it often takes multiple doses of Naloxone to resuscitate one person so restricting access is unconscionable when it means people die.
Marchese Pharmacy, located at the epicenter of the opioid crisis at James St. North and Barton Street, was providing Shelter Health Network with 24/7 access to Naloxone kits. In the past year, Marchese handed out about 5,000 intranasal kits with 3,000 going to outreach organizations like Shelter Health Network.
The pharmacy currently has 11,000 cases of Naloxone, but can no longer give kits out to organizations that don’t qualify under the ONPP.
Instead, organizations like Shelter Health Network qualify for 2 kits per visit. Each kit contains 2 doses.
Additionally, training by pharmacists can no longer be done in groups like the training I took at Gore Park during the Fringe Festival or at universities, First Nations Communities or brown bag lunch meetings. Instead, Naloxone training has to be done inside a pharmacy one person at a time.
For a government that prides itself on cutting through the red tape so that things get done and things get built, the ONPP seems like a massive blunder of red tape that constricts yet another branch of healthcare while facilitating unnecessary deaths.
And, those deaths are the deaths of people often in need of supports like sustainable, affordable housing; addiction and mental health counselling; work skills training; and a Universal Guaranteed Basic Income, or Universal Guaranteed Standard of Living as I like to refer to it.
And, if you are one of the people who thinks this will never touch their lives, well you are massively mistaken. While you may be sitting in your excessively comfortable home with all the amenities that you require, please remember that all it takes is your partner taking one too many Percocet, or perhaps a grandchild who thinks your pretty pills are candy.
In the meantime, get trained to use the two Naloxone kits you can still access — because if Ford has his way we will soon be paying for them. Then, vote out Ford and his government who view people as disposable and a problem solved when they are dead.
Music: Real Estate by UNIVERSFIELD is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License. freemusicarchive.org.
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Dr. Kerry Beal and Naloxone Kits