Evidence of meeting #43 for Veterans Affairs in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was research.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Colin Fraser Liberal West Nova, NS
As I understood it, your centre is incoming phone calls. There's a hotline number, and calls come in.
Acting Community Relations Coordinator, Distress Centre of Ottawa and Region
Yes.
February 15th, 2017 / 4:35 p.m.
Liberal
Colin Fraser Liberal West Nova, NS
Is there any thought of online services that could be accessed for you to respond to people who may not necessarily want to pick up the phone and call?
Acting Community Relations Coordinator, Distress Centre of Ottawa and Region
Yes, absolutely. This year, we're going to be rolling out a text and chat function that some distress centres in Canada have already started, which will allow people to access our services online or through their mobile phones.
The other thing, which is separate from the distress line but also a program that we run out of the distress centre, is called the wellness check program. If a patient presents to an emergency department at a specific hospital and consents to a call from us, they will receive a call within 24 to 72 hours after their discharge. If they're admitted to the hospital, we'll give them a call after their discharge, however long that may be. We'll check in with them and see if the hospital left them with a discharge plan, if they're following their medication regimens, and if they're seeing who they're supposed to be seeing. That's something that could be done with veterans, following up after the fact, because these people have said that PTSD doesn't necessarily show up right away. You can do a psych assessment the minute they're discharged, and they'll say they're fine. Then six months or a year down the road, the PTSD starts to crop up.
Liberal
Colin Fraser Liberal West Nova, NS
Thank you very much. I appreciate that answer.
Let me turn now to the Vanier Institute. You talked about the leadership circle a couple of different times, but once in response to Mr. Bratina's question. I'm just a little unclear. How does this look across the country, as far as rollout in towns and cities is concerned? Is it available to all people across the country?
Chief Executive Officer, Vanier Institute of the Family
The leadership circle is primarily national, so we work with the national partners. Having said that, we recently co-hosted a regional leadership circle in Newfoundland for Atlantic Canada to ensure that everybody from the regional organizations also had the necessary military literacy that they needed to do their job well. We were able to address some of the provincial issues.
This subject comes up often, particularly with veteran families. Because they've moved around a lot and because of the nature of our health care system, provinces need to be connected. Right now, the leadership circle is not well connected to the provinces, but it's a priority for the leadership circle. The leadership circle meets every January, and the job we've been tasked with by the members for this coming year is to find a way to engage the provinces and the regions, because we can't do what we want to do without their involvement.
Liberal
Colin Fraser Liberal West Nova, NS
Are there any recommendations we could make that would assist in this?
You could think about it and email us.
Chief Executive Officer, Vanier Institute of the Family
There could be an identifier on the medical record, absolutely, which would then allow us to track and to connect.
Right now, Ontario has some data that we can mine, but not enough. Certainly, we could have the provinces understand the veteran data in their own provinces. If you're a provincial person, you're going to think of Gagetown, or Petawawa; you're not necessarily going to think of downtown Hamilton.
Special Advisor, Vanier Institute of the Family
I think it's also important to realize that we attack nationally because....
I'll give you one specific example, of the Canadian Paediatric Society. We talked about the impact on children. They came up with a position paper and recommendations for pediatricians across the country. By dealing with a national association, they push it to their provincial and regional chapters and to clinics and offices that are going to encounter people, not unlike the way we do with a distress centre that isn't built for veterans or veteran families but that is, in their practice in providing service and support, encountering veteran families amongst other Canadian families.
This is a problem that has to be attacked right down to the local level, but of course we can't do so with every single pediatrician. The Paediatric Society owns that network of informing and educating, so we engage them.
There are impacts being felt very locally, however. One of the more recent ones dealing with mental health that is pertinent to this committee concerns Broadmind, in Kingston, where one of the members of the leadership circle is helping to bring mental health first aid to the Kingston community with what I'll call mental health first aid on steroids, because they've taken the national programming for mental health first aid and put in local resources and local support to boost the effect in that specific area.
Those are the kinds of things that need to happen. The provincial side could have an amplifier effect for getting it to local communities.
Chief Executive Officer, Vanier Institute of the Family
Can I just give one quick example?
Chief Executive Officer, Vanier Institute of the Family
Pediatricians, as a result of this, now have a program whereby they do a warm handover. Instead of your being a patient of a pediatrician and then moving across the country and going to the bottom of the waiting list and working your way up, there is now a warm handover. That military family, that veteran family now, as a result of the work that they've been doing, doesn't have to go back on a wait-list and doesn't have to start over. It's a great model that we can replicate for a whole host of other services.
Conservative
Cathay Wagantall Conservative Yorkton—Melville, SK
Thank you so much for being here today and for the amazing work that's being done.
Clearly we have a crisis across our country, and we're focused on our veterans and our armed forces. It seems to me there are two areas of mental health that we look at: the crisis situation they experience, and then the other, which is the ongoing building of frustrations in transition. These are two very different sources for dealing with your mental health.
I heard a lot of conversation about peer support, and we've heard that over and over again, about veterans helping veterans. I've never been in the armed forces, but I had a girlfriend try to tell me how to take care of my two year old before she had one. That peer support is so important. And we're hearing from all kinds of veterans organizations that are popping up and doing really good work and are very organized with top-notch therapists, psychiatrists, doctors, researchers connected with them, and then I see that we need to be funding more programs like this.
What are you thinking as far as funding is concerned? I like to think of them as innovative start-ups in a lot of ways. They don't have the money to do what they could do really well and mitigate a lot of these issues, even prevent them from happening.
National Executive Director, Mood Disorders Society of Canada
A very brief response would be we should encourage them, we should identify those that are out there that are doing a good job and replicate it and provide the funding. It's very cheap to provide peer support, provided it's recognized. And again as a patient community, one of the issues we've had with the research and medical community is that they have absolutely refused to accept the validity of peer support as an evidence-based medical intervention.
We had to twist the shared care community's arm. We refused to become involved with the collaborative care, insured care, until they recognized that on the continuum of support, shared peer support should be there. So the issue is if Veterans Affairs wants to do something, funding peer support community that provides valuable peer support. Project trauma support is very inexpensive compared to other models, and it really does work. And we know of others. The issue is whether the Government of Canada's Veterans Affairs has the desire to reach out and do this. Part of the reaction you will get is that this isn't evidence-based. We need to put more money into research.
Could I tell you a very quick story? Last year when Fantino was Minister of Veterans Affairs, he called me and Alice Aiken who was then the head of CIMVHR into the office and said we needed to do something about PTSD, particularly service dogs. I told him service dogs are really important. They work. I know they work, if he gave us the dough, we could get more service dogs, we only have a limited number of training facilities so we have to build that up...blah, blah, blah. Alice, and she was right in a certain context, told the minister we weren't sure yet. There wasn't a really good evidence base, and so he should give her the money and she should do the research and then let him know. We went back and forth. Minister Fantino said we were going to go the research route. We went the research route. The research proved what we knew worked. Common sense told us it worked. A hundred veterans told us it worked. I said now we've got evidence, would he give us some money to start working this out. And he said no, they were right out of money.
It's so discouraging to get involved in that kind of a process, and my apologies for being so long about it.
Associate National Executive Director, Mood Disorders Society of Canada
Can I add to that really quickly?
In the last few months, we brought people from across Canada to Perth to take this project trauma support, and they've already gone back to their communities and created four different peer support programs.
Right now I'm working with True Patriot Love. I'm trying to raise $350,000 to expand this program with the research component over the next 12 months. I was at Queen's yesterday. Heather Stuart is happy to do the research on this for free, so there we'll have the evidence base, but I need $350,000. We're going out fundraising with our hat in hand.
Conservative
Cathay Wagantall Conservative Yorkton—Melville, SK
I know of a group from Saskatchewan with all the research done. They are functioning as a charity to create exactly that, service dogs that would be provided to our veterans, not at $20,000 or $30,000 a piece, but free of charge. This is where I get really frustrated in looking at the dynamics of what should be done because it can be done, and the bureaucracy slows everything down.
Associate National Executive Director, Mood Disorders Society of Canada
I'd be happy to send you our PTSD ask, so there you go. There's a good answer. There's some meat in the oven for supper.
Associate National Executive Director, Mood Disorders Society of Canada
It's a start. It's bringing everything together and it's starting the ball forward. We can sit around and talk about this, but I wouldn't be doing my job if I wasn't sitting here saying that we need to throw some money at this right now. People are losing their lives.
Associate National Executive Director, Mood Disorders Society of Canada
There's a program in the United States; twenty-two veterans a day are taking their own lives. We have to change this and we have to do it with some concrete steps.
Conservative
Cathay Wagantall Conservative Yorkton—Melville, SK
We have to deal with the crisis we're in, but I would like to see us cut the head off the dragon. Right off the bat there are so many ways that people are saying they could help if DND would keep these people in service, paid, until they are truly ready to be released with all of the supports they need. I think that's a direction we need to go in as well.
I've probably used my time.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Neil Ellis
In fairness, I'm going to give you an extra minute, because I think everybody else has had at least that much today.