Coquitlam City Hall has penned a letter to the health minister and the Fraser Health Authority to press for faster admissions at Eagle Ridge Hospital for residents with mental health challenges.
The call comes after the superintendent of the Coquitlam RCMP stood before city council last month to talk about the detachment’s first trimester of 2023 and report on crime trends.
Supt. Keith Bramhill told council-in-committee that, between January and March, there was a 44 per cent increase in mental health-related police files compared with the three-year average. As well, there was also an 18 per cent hike in average hospital wait times, and a 75 per cent jump in the number of files with hospital wait times greater than two hours.
In the first three months, the average wait time was 107 minutes versus the usual 91 minutes.
The longer wait times were likely because of emergency room staffing shortages, he said.
“It’s a terrible waste of our resources,” said Coun. Brent Asmundson, who — after hearing police were tied up for five hours waiting at Eagle Ridge Hospital for one file on April 30 — asked the June 19 committee to write a letter to the health authorities for better efficiencies.
Mayor Richard Stewart, who has been advocating for better local services for people with mental health challenges, said the hospital wait times can be “fatal” for some patients.
“Those wait times can cause patients to appear better or more exhausted when they get to the psychiatrist and be released when they ought not to have been,” he told the officer-in-charge.
Bramhill said the uptick in mental health-related and missing persons files over the past 36 months is impacting the detachment’s service and “affects the quality of our investigations.”
He singled out the Red Fish Healing Centre for Mental Health and Addiction at səmiq̓wəʔelə/Riverview Lands for accounting for nearly a quarter of all mental health calls, or 161 files, in T1.
And each file takes an officer about 25 hours to process to comply with regulations, he said.
A request for comment from the Provincial Health Services Authority was not returned.
Meanwhile, the first trimester report also showed an 11 per cent rise in person crimes (assaults, sex offences, robberies) and a three per cent dip in property crimes (theft of and from vehicles, fraud), according to metrics compiled by the detachment’s Crime Analyst Unit.
In terms of public outreach, the community policing team held a Farsi fraud prevention seminar in March; two news releases also came out to warn residents about bitcoin fraud.
In his report, Bramhill said there’s been a jump in online fraud files at his and other detachments across Canada “and unfortunately, many of these crimes involve offenders that live in other provinces and countries, making it difficult to investigate and pursue charges.”
