When 14-year-old Destiny Gettings was on the verge of taking her own life her mother said she had one option to save it.
“Stabilization is the immediate need for acute help for these kids. It’s not something that can be prolonged,” Jackie Gettings said. “They need to get into a unit where there are psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors and nurses.”
There are just six youth stabilization beds in B.C., and none within Fraser Health, so when Gettings took Destiny to Abbotsford Hospital begging for stabilization, her daughter was discharged.
“She was talking at that time about killing herself over the phone with me,” Jackie said. “She had mentioned it that same evening to two of her friends.”
At its annual general meeting, Fraser Health president and CEO Michael Marchbank said they are addressing the need by increasing community services and will also open a unit next year in Surrey.
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The opening has been delayed by eight months but until then youth in crisis have few options if the six beds at B.C. Children’s Hospital are full.
“They’re treated either in the emergency, in a pediatric unit, not a psychiatric unit or in some situations in an adult unit,” Surrey Hospital Foundation president Jane Adams said.
Fraser Health is short on adult stabilization beds as well with 32 beds under its Community Residential Emergency Short-Stay Treatment program. That number is down from 52 beds in 2006 and short of the projected need of 84 beds by next year.
This is not the first time the project has been delayed. Fraser Health tried to recruit new psychiatrists in a pamphlet that said the unit “is planned to open in December 2014”. That date was pushed back to September 2016, which was referenced at the annual general meeting by Marchbank. Fraser Health says now that new private funding has been secured, the new opening date is May 2017, a delay of eight months.
The B.C. Nurses’ Union is calling on Fraser Health to re-open an adolescent psychiatric unit in Abbotsford Hospital that was shut down in 2009.
READ MORE: Number of mental health licensed care beds in Abbotsford going down
Fraser Health says it has been converted to a full-service adolescent day treatment program. The nurses say that’s just one room in an otherwise empty facility, but Fraser Health says “the entire footprint” of the former adolescent psychiatric unit is now the adolescent day treatment program.
“At the moment, regardless of how a child or youth comes to us in need, whether it is through the Emergency Department, or a community-based service, they are provided with a variety of acute and community-based services as appropriate,” Tasleem Juma of Fraser Health told Global News.
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She went on adding, “Providing care isn’t only about one hospital unit, it is about connecting patients with a whole system and network of care and services.”
Jackie Gettings has concerns. “I think that without stabilization, this is where our children are getting lost. This is where they’re committing suicide.”
That leaves parents like her with little choice but to take their at-risk children to emergency and hope for the best.
-With files from John Hua
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