Check the paper for more alternatives to secure care from Scotland, Netherlands, and Hawaii. Secure care is harmful, and so we have an ethical duty to invest in intensive voluntary supports. Link to paper:
www.mdpi.com/2673-995X/4/...

This residential program involves 90-days of intensive clinical engagement, family treatment, and community oversight. Afterwards, most youth are successfully transitioned to less-intensive placements.

Also in Calgary, Woods homes provides therapeutic campus-based care as an alternative to secure care. This involves 24h intensive, therapeutic support for children who have experienced placement breakdowns and have complex mental health and behavior needs.

I will note that while this program is great, this kind of structured aftercare is not provided for families/carers who use the PChAD program in Alberta (short-term involuntary secure care program for youth using substances). IMO this is a major missed opportunity to divert youth from PChAD.

This is called the Acute@Home program. It provides intensive outreach to families/carers as they transition from a hospital setting to their community. Families/cares receive support for 6-8 weeks to help mitigate the need for further hospital admissions.

For example, in Calgary, Wood’s homes partnered with Alberta Children’s hospital to provide immediate, in-home support, advocacy, and system navigation to families/carers whose youth are admitted to the emergency department for a mental health crisis.

Alternatives to secure care could include intensive community-based wrap around supports, intensive residential care placements, or outreach/transitional support as a part of short-term secure stabilization interventions. Kate Crowe identified a few alternatives to secure care used in Alberta.

This lack of suitable alternatives drives decisions to admit youth to secure care. We need a robust spectrum of voluntary services to ensure involuntary interventions are not used unnecessarily (because that is unethical!).

People often say that secure care is a last resort. But what interventions should we try before resorting to secure care? Too often, families lack access to voluntary options when their youth is struggling with mental health and addictions.

To summarize, secure care is a bad outcome for youth because: 1) it can be experienced as punitive and harmful, 2) longer-term trajectories appear unchanged by secure care, 3) it makes little to no difference for substance use or mental health outcomes, and 4) it can increase risk of overdose.

Thanks for sharing! Yes, 4 of the 17 parents we talked to for the study had their youth die from overdose.

This is so sad :( I remember what a huge win this was when it opened

Part 3: Survey Results from Anirniq and Ipiihkoohkanipiaohtsi

#yegcc #cdnpoli #yegmunicipal #yegelections #yegelections2025

Part 2: Survey Results from Anirniq and Ipiihkoohkanipiaohtsi

#yegcc #cdnpoli #yegmunicipal #yegelections #yegelections2025