Thank you so much, Chair. It's a pleasure to be here.
Thank you, Dr. Lavoie, for your comments.
I think my comments will build on many of the comments that Dr. Lavoie has mentioned.
I'm a psychiatrist. I'm the department head at the University of Manitoba and provincial specialty lead. What I'm going to present is based on funding from CIHR.
The main summary of what I'm going to say is that we absolutely need a public health approach to manage the mental health sequelae of the COVID-19 pandemic. We need to look at it from universal strategies as well as targeted strategies for our vulnerable groups. As Dr. Lavoie was saying, there are lots of opportunities to enhance our virtual mental health care services, not only for elective services, but especially for our emergent services.
We also need to invest in appropriate infrastructure for isolation in the community for vulnerable groups. Success will only occur where there are strong partnerships among federal, provincial, community and private sectors.
I'm going to tell you the story of a 15-year-old boy living in a rural community in Manitoba who loses a friend suddenly in an accident. He is brought to the nursing station by his grandfather because he is suicidal. He has also been in contact with someone who is COVID-positive. He needs an emergency mental health assessment, but he does not want to travel to Winnipeg for that assessment, which is hundreds of kilometres away. Pre-pandemic and during the pandemic, the person would have to be brought to Winnipeg, stay in the hospital for a few days, and that would increase the risk of COVID transmission. I'm going to come back to the case in a few moments.
The COVID pandemic has impacted all Canadians. During the pandemic, Canadians have had an increase in distress, fear, anxiety, alcohol and drug use. We have to invest in appropriate media campaigns that focus on mental wellness strategies and remind people of the low-risk guidelines for alcohol and substance use. These media campaigns are extremely important to invest in because, as Dr. Lavoie says, people actually don't know some of these important strategies.
We need to improve pathways to accessing care. In Manitoba and other provinces, it is extremely difficult for a person to access mental health care in a timely manner. Whatever we can do to simplify access is going to improve the system.
We need to invest in virtual mental health care using a stepped care approach, using online screening tools, phone supports, and then having people be able to access services virtually, either individual or group therapy, based on measurement-based care. We need to appropriately staff these virtual mental health care resources, and we need to pivot towards measurement-based care so we're actually monitoring people's outcomes as they are going through the treatments.
I want to focus on the crisis in emergent population, which is at high risk. People in crisis often wait for long periods of time in the emergency department for a mental health assessment. Rural sites face greater access barriers for emergency assessment than urban sites, and during the pandemic, fear of acquiring COVID-19 in a hospital may prevent people from getting life-saving treatments.
In Manitoba, we have pivoted towards doing more emergency virtual mental health care. In partnerships with federal, provincial and community partners, we have implemented a pilot where there's a youth telepsychiatry emergent service that provides service across all rural EDs as well as rural first nations. The goal is simply to reduce the transfers of youth for assessment and reduce the need for hospital admissions. Over the last three months, we have already reduced one transfer to Winnipeg per week.
The adult crisis response centre has also transformed the majority of their crisis services for urgent mental health addictions assessment to a virtual platform, and we have also developed virtual wards where people can get daily assessments and supports at home with appropriate supports from their families so we can try to minimize the exposure to COVID.
Our University of Manitoba Ongomiizwin-Health Services has developed COVID rapid response teams that are designed to go into first nations communities to support the community leadership in identifying contact tracing, helping with isolation procedures and helping with rapid point-of-care testing to reduce the spread of COVID-19.
The last important project I'll talk about in Manitoba is the alternate isolation accommodations. We know that people who are exposed to COVID in homeless shelters and cannot isolate appropriately, as well as seniors and health care workers, are at significant risk of spreading COVID. Alternate isolation accommodations in hotels and apartment buildings have been utilized to help with isolation and health supports. Over 800 people in Manitoba have utilized these to reduce the transmission of COVID. The At Home/Chez Soi project that many of you are familiar with uses a harm reduction approach for our homeless population. That approach is also being used in our communities.
I'm going to come back to the story of the 15-year-old boy. He had come to the first nations community, in crisis, with his grandfather. He was exposed to COVID. He got a virtual telehealth assessment from Winnipeg, so he did not have to travel to Winnipeg for an assessment. There was no need for an immediate psychiatric admission. He was able to stay in his home community and be isolated in a hotel for a few days until the test results came back.
I'll end there.
I look forward to the questions.