Sobering center in Farmington, Virginia/via Farmington Daily Times
The head of the group running the Phoenix Centre says its hopeful it will be getting a response “soon” to a revised pitch for a sobering centre at their location.
Sian Lewis with the Day One Society says its her understanding the revised business case, compiled by the City of Kamloops, was submitted to the Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions just before Christmas.
“Our facility does have the space on the lower levels to house a sobering and assessment center,” argued Lewis. “Through many consultations it was decided that it perhaps is one of the better locations, given that it is connected to a detox, and directly across the street from Royal Inland Hospital.”
She says if they do get a positive response back, that’s when they’ll start crunching numbers on issues such as design and staffing.
“Nursing staff are hard to find. We do this [sobering centre] as a model that would LPN’s [Licensed Practical Nurses] at the very least. So again, we would be looking for staff to bring this into full operation. But I think we’re a ways away from that yet.”
Day One has been offering $20,000 signing bonuses to secure nurses to get the youth detox center at the Phoenix Centre up and running, something Lewis has said they hope to achieve by mid-February.
Despite the potential challenges, Lewis says she remains hopeful Victoria will sign-off as quickly as possible.
“We’ve been working on this together as a community since 2016, and this time was slightly different because we actually had an invitation to resend that business case,” Lewis said.
Revised plans for a Kamloops sobering centre – which has been on Kamloops council’s wish list since the previous term – were requested by the province following ministerial discussions with city officials at last year’s Union of BC Municipalities convention.
City staff and Council are also hopeful that a new report from B.C.’s police watchdog will lead to progress in these plans to build a sobering centre.
A sobering centre is meant to provide a medically supervised place for people to come down from their most recent stint with drugs or alcohol, as an alternative to locking someone up overnight or having the medical system take care of them.
