Thank you, Chair, for the opportunity to speak to your distinguished committee today.
I'm Dr. Nathaniel Day, the provincial medical director of addiction for Alberta Health Services. I am also the person who designed and, with our team, implemented Alberta's virtual opioid dependency program. I was a member of the minister's opioid emergency response commission in Alberta under the Notley government and I was the co-chair of the recovery expert advisory panel for Alberta's current government.
I will briefly summarize some of the actions we have taken in Alberta to respond to the current phase of the opioid addiction and overdose crisis. I will raise things that I think are successful and could be replicated. Of course, a long-term problem requires long-term effort in order to see maximal benefits.
As recently as 2016, Alberta, like all jurisdictions, struggled to meet the needs of people with opioid addiction living anywhere not immediately local to a bricks and mortar opioid dependency treatment program. All jurisdictions have struggled with this problem. I proposed a new approach that provided virtual care, now expanded to every community in Alberta. To our knowledge, we were the first program to ever look at exclusively virtual care with no in-person component. We collected data on outcomes for our patients, which was published in the literature. By providing virtual service, we were able to reach people who had never been reached previously. We served people in 331 different communities, villages, cities and hamlets all across our geography.
Since 2018 we have not had a wait-list for services. If you need help today, you get help today. Right now there are people in Alberta who are certainly calling in for help, and then our allied health team starts an assessment. Our physicians work on shift 24 hours per day to assess and treat. Prescriptions go out to pharmacies closest to the patient, including delivery to remote indigenous communities. Because we use virtual tools, we can also support new places where people with opioid addiction are located. Our objective is to reach anyone who needs our care, wherever they may be.
For example, we have found that police, like all frontline workers, want to help the people they encounter who suffer from addiction. Police in all jurisdictions have people who use opioids, who are arrested for any reason and who, while waiting to see a justice of the peace, are going into or are at risk of going into withdrawal. In Alberta, when a person is under arrest they can be connected confidentially, using the same rooms that a person would use to speak with a lawyer, to get a health care intervention to manage their withdrawal, and an invitation to continue with us if they choose. About 10% of those patients are filling prescriptions in community 90 days later.
We supported the Province of Alberta's encampment response. We provide support to people in shelters, low-barrier housing programs and supervised consumption sites—essentially wherever a person is who wants service. Alberta is expanding access to bed-based services. Government has funded access to bed-based treatment spaces that were previously private. Government has eliminated the copay for addiction treatment. Alberta's government has also announced 11 new recovery community treatment programs, two of which are now in operation. The others are in various stages of planning or construction.
Alberta is working with provincial corrections to expand meaningful treatment for people with addiction who are incarcerated. Alberta has legislated licensing and accreditation standards for addiction service providers. This ensures that any Albertan who accesses our system of care receives evidence-based quality services.
We have a gap medication program that gives no-cost provision of Suboxone, Sublocade or methadone to anyone with a health care number, with no application and no delay.
There is much more that we could talk about. I will conclude with this: We would not be in this situation if our communities and families were as healthy as they could be. I recommend that this committee support only initiatives that will improve community and family wellness. It is important that all people with addiction—which touches all Canadian families and communities—be offered hope. Hope is, in my opinion, the antidote to stigma. Hope is powerful, and the evidence shows that when it sets in, it increases positive outcomes.