New information about psychiatric patient escapes from St. Joseph’s Healthcare’s West 5th campus is raising alarm bells for one Hamilton city councillor.
The latest psychiatric patient to escape from the forensic unit at St. Joseph’s mental-health facility on Hamilton mountain did so on July 3, and was found in less than 24 hours.
However, it is the third such case in a month and there have been 26 escapes in the last three years.
Now, the city councillor for that area is calling for an independent review of the safety procedures.
Ward 8’s Terry Whitehead fears sooner or later, there will be trouble if things don’t change.
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He says “it’s just a matter of time before somebody gets killed. We need to act now to make sure that the mechanisms are in place and the processes are correct so that we can mitigate as much of the risk to this community as practical.”
The councillor is not happy with the plan allowing involuntary patients to earn liberty with good behaviour.
Whitehead says “it’s a concern because it makes the neighbourhood into a test site. It sounds like it’s a lab or a social experiment to test whether the patient’s assessment is correct and if it’s not, something goes wrong.”
One change he’d like to see is better communication when a psychiatric patient becomes the subject of a search.
For example, the mountain councillor says the latest news release about the search for a patient said, “He poses no threat to the public at this time.” However, Whitehead says the Ontario Review Board in April found him to be “a significant threat to the safety of the public.”
Whitehead will be putting a motion before city council calling on the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care to launch an independent review.
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