EDMONTON – Alberta Hospital Edmonton will be get $15 million in renovations to build four mental health in-patient units with 80 beds, 60 of which are new.
The announcement, made Monday at the hospital in northeast Edmonton, comes after years of controversy and concern that the aging facility was on the cutting block. A $200-million development to make Alberta Hospital into a modern mental-health facility was killed in 2009, in part because former Alberta Health Services CEO Stephen Duckett said the buildings were too old and decrepit. He decided it was better to move 246 patients from Alberta Hospital into community beds.
That was partly reversed in early 2010, when then-health minister Gene Zwozdesky directed that only 100 geriatric patients would move from Alberta Hospital to the newly constructed Villa Caritas facility in the new year.
The empty space they left behind in Building 12 on the 165-hectare site – much of it green space – will now be transformed into four 20-bed units. One is a rapid-discharge unit that helps patients get ready to move back into the community with proper support systems. Another is a short-stay crisis unit where patients who have taken a downturn while living in the community, can come for emergency care from two to five days. The other two units are for specific patient populations also preparing to move out, one with complex multiple mental-health issues and developmental delays, the other fighting both mental illness and addiction to drugs or alcohol.
“That’s been a huge service gap in the community right now,” said Dr. Daniel Li, president of the Alberta Hospital medical staff association. The new services, funded with $9 million in addition to the $15 million in capital funding, will help fill that gap. Alberta Health Services hasn’t determined how many staff will be hired for the new units. Currently, dietitians, pharmacists, psychologists, nurses, occupational therapists, physiotherapists and others work with the 30 full-time psychiatrists at the facility.
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“This investment and the leadership will help increase access for Albertans who need hospital-based mental-health services and help us get the right care to the patients at the right time,” Li said
The opening of one 20-bed mental health unit typically allows an estimated 500 additional patients to flow through the larger hospital system, Li said. Access will also improve when $5 million from the government goes to hire more community outreach workers to help clients take medications properly, learn food preparation, housekeeping and hygiene skills, and ensure social networks are maintained to help people with mental illness live as independently as possible.
That way, once they leave the hospital, the patients are less likely to relapse and head back through emergency doors. Another $3 million is slated to increase psychology and counselling services in family care clinics and screen new mothers for depression.
Each year, more than 500,000 Albertans or 16 per cent of the population, receive mental-health services from physicians.
“The difference is this: we’re not just opening new acute-care beds,” Li said, noting that one in five people will be treated for mental illness in their lifetime.
With another $8 million, outreach workers will head to schools to work with children about suicide and bullying prevention, smoking and alcohol issues, and to provide home visits and resources for parents.
“These support services are critical,” Health Minister Fred Horne said, acknowledging the need to boost community care. He doesn’t know what the future holds for other Alberta Hospital buildings that are aging and not in use, but said the government is committed to the facility.
“Alberta Hospital Edmonton will continue to be a beacon of hope,” Horne said. “There is a place for institutional care in our mental-health system. … Today is a beginning. I hope that people will see, particularly patients and families, will see today as the turning of a page. It’s a discussion of new opportunities: there can be new advances in care that can be made possible because of Alberta Hospital Edmonton.”
Tom Shand, executive director for the Alberta division of the Canadian Mental Health Association, said Monday’s $40 million announcement is a “turning point for mental health for Albertans.”
“Certainly the dollars are appreciated and not insignificant, but I think even more so (is) the balancing of acute care and care in the community, the importance of that is so critical,” Shand said.
He said staff and patients have been living in limbo, unsure of the hospital’s future. That made recruitment of psychiatrists and others difficult.
“There’s nothing worse than uncertainty, not only for the staff because they don’t know what’s going to be happening one, two or five years down the road, but it also impacts patients and the family of those patients,” Shand said.
“That element of uncertainty is really hard on people. They have a hard enough time dealing with the challenges they face anyhow without (not) knowing there is going to be somewhere when things don’t work out for them, that they’re going to be treated well.”
Mayor Stephen Mandel lauded the news.
“It’s long been coming,” he said. “This is really one of the pre-eminent facilities in Canada and I think it’s been way underused. Now it’s going to have an opportunity to reach its goals. … Those with more challenges in our society will have an opportunity to find some solace in this facility.”
The money for the mental-health initiative is contained in this year’s provincial budget, which still needs to be passed by the legislature.
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