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(KIM ANDERSON / iNFOnews.ca)

Interior Health needs to step in with way more resources if Kelowna hopes to deal with escalating mental health problems on its streets, according to Kelowna RCMP's top cop.

While ground-level workers with Interior Health are working hard to make things better, most services shut down after business hours and only one-third of mental health calls taken by the RCMP have a health-care worker with them.

“Access to care greatly declines after business hours,” Supt. Kara Triance told city council today, Feb. 28.

“We have some services available through the Crisis Response Team up to 11 p.m. After that, it is 24/7 emergency room only. That requires us to formulate the grounds for apprehension under the Mental Health Act, which means somebody has to be in serious or imminent harm to themselves or others in order to apprehend them and take them to an emergency room for an assessment.”

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Police responded to 3,100 calls last year with a mental health component, which included three murders.

There is one team with an RCMP officer and a nurse but Interior Health will not fund a second nurse for that program so a specially trained RCMP officer attends such calls alone.

One example Triance gave was of a person is having a psychotic episode and flipping tables over in a downtown café. That could be a case where a health worker could attend and provide medication or other services on the spot since that person is not likely to make appointments by phone and show up.

While Triance is making some progress on things like having matching data sets with Interior Health on what constitutes mental health calls, there are problems starting at the top.

“Interior Health is doing what they can right now with their existing resources,” Triance said. “However, it’s not lost on me that there have been a lot of changes on the management level with the team I’m working with, not only regionally but also locally.”

In 18 months there have been three different Interior Health managers on the regional mental health and substance use committee.

“That is significantly impacting the meaningful work we are doing,” Triance said.

She’s calling for enhanced street level services that are available around the clock, not just during business hours.

"You will see that in Vancouver. You will see that in Surrey. You will see that in Victoria," Triance said. “We have not met a size and scope right now of psychiatric street services for Kelowna but I would argue we are there.”

She doesn’t know what the threshold is to qualify for that level of service but argued, with 3,100 calls with mental health components last year, Kelowna needs that level of service from Interior Health.

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