Quesnel council is hoping our community will become the latest Situation Table in British Columbia.
Situation Tables bring frontline workers from a variety of agencies together to serve people who are at risk due to drugs, alcohol, suicide and other issues by co-ordinating immediate interventions. There are currently 11 Situation Tables in B.C., including one in Williams Lake, and four have recently been funded, including one in Prince George.
At its Dec. 1 meeting, council agreed to write a letter to the provincial Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General saying it supports a Situation Table in Quesnel.
Council’s support comes after Maja Langrish, policy analyst with the Office of Crime Reduction and Gang Outreach in the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General, gave a presentation about Situation Tables to the city’s Public Safety and Policing Committee in October.
A Situation Table is comprised of frontline workers from various agencies and sectors, including police, local and Indigenous governments, emergency services, school board, non-profit service providers and the health authority. The table meets weekly or bi-weekly and shares limited information on clients facing elevated levels of risk and co-ordinates immediate interventions.
“We had a number of tables that are inter-agency-type tables,” Mayor Bob Simpson said at the council meeting. “We’ve always had an ad-hoc group that came together to deal with individuals and intervention with individuals in our community to try to be proactive in cutting off some problematic behaviours or some health and safety issues for the individuals. This Situation Table process is at that level, so it’s inter-agency, but inter-agency with respect to specific individuals or families in our community that a proactive approach to assisting them at an inter-agency table would be very helpful to both them and potentially the community.”
Simpson, who explained that the ministry has offered Quesnel a chance to join the Situation Table process, provided a letter of support to Langrish on Dec. 1, and now council as whole will add its endorsement as well.
In his letter to Langrish, Simpson notes that many existing and emerging public safety challenges require “ongoing, multi-sector collaboration by the police, social service providers and health agencies to preserve and promote community safety.”
“We are encouraged that a Situation Table will enable Quesnel’s frontline service providers to proactively identify vulnerable people and families at risk of harm or victimization and rapidly connect them to services before they experience a negative or traumatic event (e.g. overdose, eviction, etc.),” he wrote.
In his letter, Simpson says the benefits of a Situation Table include improved collaboration among service providers, improved service delivery, reduced demand for emergency and police services, reduced risk of criminal offending and victimization, and a fostered awareness of complex community issues.
Tanya Turner, the city’s director of development services, says the offer of engaging in a Situation Table comes with a $40,000 one-time grant for training.
“There is a table that very much operates like this, so it will just be giving this table a little more teeth and resources for something that’s already occurring, as well as having the ability to reach out to other ministries or other partners that are not at the table and bring them to the table now,” she said. “Those are some of the biggest benefits that are going to come out of this.”
Turner says another big benefit is the statistics from the work that is being done at this table will be reported back up to council on an annual basis.
Coun. Mitch Vik was very supportive of the initiative, as he feels it has many benefits on many levels.
“I’m absolutely in favour of this commitment that we’re hopefully going to make tonight, specifically, when we’re talking about identifying at-risk individuals and offering a co-ordinated response and assistance to these individuals before there’s community ramifications, so it seems highly, highly reasonable to pursue this line of thinking, notwithstanding the fact that there’s grant funding to help us get set up with this and become experts and proficient in how to run a program like this,” he said.
READ MORE: Quesnel makes strides to become safer
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