City council is standing behind the Hamilton Urban Core Community Health Care and its ongoing effort to save lives.
Councillors have passed a motion supporting the organization’s application for funding of a permanent facility to respond to the ongoing opioid crisis.
Since last June, Hamilton Urban Core has hosted a temporary overdose prevention site on Rebecca Street.
The supervised injection site has had more than 2,300 visits and is credited with saving 23 lives by reversing overdoses.
In October, the provincial government announced that Consumption and Treatment Service (CTS) would replace injection sites, still offering overdose prevention but shifting the focus to treatment and rehabilitation services.
Hamilton Urban Core is submitting its application to host such a facility, ahead of a Dec. 31 deadline.
Statistics released this week by Hamilton Public Health show Opioid-related deaths are on pace to top 100 this year in Hamilton.
That’s according to data covering the first six months of 2018, which show there were 60 overdose deaths from January through June.
That’s a 28 per cent increase, compared to 47 deaths during the first half of 2017.