Good afternoon.
My name is Theresa Sabourin. I'm the executive director at the Petawawa military family resource centre. I have been the executive director there for the past 20 years, so pre-inception of the MFSP program.
I'm delighted to be here today to talk to you about fragmentation of services relating to OSIs. I would also like to state that I echo the issues and challenges and the opportunities that have been previously expressed by my colleagues.
Military family resource centres are safe places for families. Many MFRCs work closely with operational stress injury social support, OSISS, peer support coordinators, but many do not have well-established relationships. These two services are often the first line of support for a family with an undiagnosed OSI or PTSD member, and both services are seeing an increase in families reaching out for support. We see this as a positive first step in helping families and, although some families report they're concerned about potential career implications, their family health is more important.
Family members are often the first to identify the signs of an OSI in their military loved one. Families need to be able to access supports for their mental health and for the mental health of their children prior to the clinical diagnosis of their military member by a psychiatrist. Families need support to deal with the daily challenges of caring for their loved one, as these families are at greater risk of depression and suffer compassion fatigue. This leads to increases in stressors on family functioning and contributes to family disintegration. We as a service system need to provide timely information about OSIs and PTSD and where to go for resources and support.
When the military member is diagnosed and accessing treatment at the operational trauma and stress support centre, OTSSC, the family is not always included as part of the process. Although the family receives information about what an OSI is, they may not have an opportunity to discuss the impact of this on their family unless the military member identifies this as a priority.
For example, in a home where a military member is functioning with an OSI and that member is being verbally abusive toward his or her spouse, that spouse is not necessarily being validated at the OTSSC level and sometimes cannot participate in a meeting to discuss these issues, thereby increasing the stress in this family. Families often come forward when there is caregiver burnout. The MFRC provides a number of services, such as respite child care, but cannot coordinate with the OTSSC because its mandate is to support the members where they are. Unfortunately, there is no client consent to share information with MFRCs; consequently, we cannot work together as colleagues on behalf of supporting family needs and the needs of the entire family.
Further, Veterans Affairs Canada can only support a family if the OSI sufferer is currently a VAC client. Other CF services, such as local-base mental health, do not have the capacity to support the family member and often families must be referred to external community resources for which there are extensive waiting lists. At times, these particular service providers lack military experience, which impacts their capacity to treat the family. For example, if a spouse states to her counsellor, “My husband may have PTSD, because he was involved in an IED explosion while he was travelling in his LAV”, this may mean very little to a counsellor with no military experience. We need to have dedicated clinical resources available to these families.
MFRCs are often challenged in our outreach capacity to families due to the lack of provision of basic information, such as nominal roles or inclusion in critical incident stress teams. MFRCs are not consistently informed of casualties in theatre of operations, and this causes inequities in our ability to reach out in a timely manner to connect with and offer support to our families. It is crucial to connect with families early, to provide early interventions and referrals as needed.
In conclusion, I would like to share with you two initiatives that demonstrate our support capacity and give hope to our systemic ability to support our families.
The Petawawa MFRC is currently working with a local children's mental health service, which is funded by the province. We are providing access to immediate therapeutic services relating to child and family functioning as a result of the stressors of military operations. We are working together with a panel of experts to gain from the collective wealth of experience that services such as CHEO and SickKids have that will contribute to our effectiveness for military families and using this to develop our best practices.
We have also identified the need to orient community service practitioners and professionals to the military lifestyle, and are presently developing an orientation practice and process. My colleagues can certainly also share many other examples of local initiatives that are responsive to family needs.
What I'm most excited about, and what I believe will defragment our services, is an opportunity I had to participate in a working group to address a multidisciplinary network to support military families and their members who are ill or injured through a one-stop access to services and supports. This is very exciting for military families, because it will mean that all services, including the MFRC, will co-locate to provide a holistic approach to supporting these families, and greatly reduce our service gaps and increase our effectiveness.
In my 20 years working with military family support, we have come a long way. I'm just here today to state that we still have a ways to go.
Thank you.