B.C.’s chief coroner is calling for regulations to reporting for people who access substance use treatment.

Lisa Lapointe says there are no standards for reporting how many people are looking for services or accessing services. There’s also no standards or definitions of positive outcomes.

She used treatment beds as an example.

“Beds are not all that we need. Beds are a component of what people are looking for, residential care, but there are other services people are looking for. And quite frankly, we don’t know. We just don’t know, right now, how many beds we need, or how many services we need,” she says.

“Because we don’t have a good sense of how many people in each community are looking to access those services. So that’s why we need to start with some regulations around reporting, so that we get a sense of the number of people seeking services. And what are the services that we’re seeking? And then we need to make the plan to build those services for those people.”

Lapointe adds many families spend tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of dollars for their loved to go in and out of recovery homes. “We don’t know if they have any value, frankly, because we don’t have any reporting around that.”

She says a newly-announced Expert Death Review Panel will investigate how to bring in regulations.

Right now, there’s no formal timeline, other than “the sooner the better,” Lapointe says. She adds that the Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions is aware of the gaps in the system and says she’s encouraged that changes can be made.

Tuesday marked five years of a provincial health emergency in B.C. from the opioid crisis. In that time, more than 7,000 residents have lost their lives to drug addiction, including at least 219 people in Kamloops. Health officials say the average age of death for a suspected overdose in B.C. is 43 years old.