The Peer Assistance Care Team has responded to more than 1,700 calls since launching in New Westminster in 2023.
PACT teams, which are comprised of a mental health worker and a peer support worker (someone with lived or living experience), attend crisis calls and provide trauma-informed, culturally safe support to youth and adults in New Westminster. Launched its January 2023 in New West, PACT has responded to more than 1,700 calls.
Nicole Sto Thomas, coordinator of the local program, said PACT is a mobile service that provides support to people in New Westminster who are experiencing a mental health or substance-use related crisis. Trained team of mental health workers and peer support workers attend crisis calls to people who are 13 and older.
“In terms of the type of calls, reasons people call our service, it really varies, but it includes things like thoughts of self harm or suicide, fear, anxiety and depression, substance-use related crisis, loss of reality, and any other mental health emergencies,” she said. “How we respond is by providing crisis de-escalation and counselling. We facilitate connections to supports and services to ensure that folks are getting the care that they need. We offer timely in-person support to folks in crisis, or we can also provide support over the phone or through text. And we can also offer short-term followup following a crisis event, if that person needs it.”
In November 2021, New Westminster city council approved the city’s participation in the Peer Assisted Care Team pilot project with the Canadian Mental Health Association. In the fall of 2022, council supported the selection of the Lower Mainland Purpose Society as the operator of the PACT pilot project in New West.
Representatives from the Lower Mainland Purpose Society recently provided the New Westminster police board with an update on the program. They also explained the program’s relationship with the New Westminster Police Department – a relationship that was described as being a bit different than what exists in some of the other communities where PACT is in place.
“Our program launched in January of 2023. Since then, we've had 1,714 calls,” Sto Thomas told the police board. “Of those 1,700 calls we've received so far, 80 of them have included the police, and that's either through direct referrals or it's a call that has involved a police officer.”
Sto Thomas said PACT calls involving police fall into several categories, including:
- Police officers responding to a “check well-being” call may find an individual who is not sectionable under the Mental Health Act but is clearly struggling with their mental health and would benefit from mental health supports.
- Individuals calling 911 on multiple occasions to ask people to investigate situations, but the calls are determined not to be a police matter. This could include people experiencing psychosis and paranoia or older folks having cognitive issues or dementia; they may think people are surveilling them or are breaking into their homes, but that’s not the case – and the call is considered a mental health issue, not a police matter.
- People going to the New Westminster police station to seek help with situations such as being evicted or becoming homeless – and they don’t know what to do. In some cases, people in psychosis attend the police station to ask for help.
- People having mental health concerns or feeling distressed call seeking support or wanting to be accompanied to the hospital because of mental health concerns.
“Those are some of the major themes that we've seen so far,” she said.
According to Sto Thomas, the local program has been fortunate to have fostered “a really positive relationship” with the New Westminster Police Department. That includes the NWPD’s mental health liaison, who has sent referrals to the program when it’s clear a case is related to a mental health concern and isn’t something that needs to involving policing.
“That's been really helpful. I would say that we average around at least one or two police calls a week,” she said. “In addition to direct calls from police, we also get calls from individuals who will tell us 'Hi, I called the police last week. They gave me your brochure. We want to just see how you might be able to help us.'”
Sto Thomas said one of the goals is to make it so that when folks call the team directly when they are in a mental health emergency, rather than calling 911.
“They can just call our team directly, so that the police can focus on doing the work they need to do, the policing stuff that they need to do for the city,” she said. “When folks need support, mental health counselling, resources, they could call us directly to free up the police resources.”
You can call the Peer Assisted Care Team in New West at 778-727-3909
Our Peer Assisted Care Team (PACT) hour have expanded!
— Lower Mainland Purpose Society (@Purpose_Society) November 20, 2023
PACT is generously supported with funding from the BC Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions. pic.twitter.com/bFtkLDQimU
“We’re quite unique”
Sto Thomas said the PACT program appreciates the NWPD’s support for the team and the good work they’ve been doing to collaborate on helping folks experiencing crisis in New West.
Lynda Fletcher-Gordon, acting executive director of the Purpose Society, said the PACT program has had a great relationship with the police since its launch. When the New West program began last January, she said it was one of three PACT programs in B.C. – and the only one interested in working with the police and having a police force that was responsive to the PACT program.
“So, we're quite unique,” she said. “The program has been able to do a lot more because of the police responsiveness and wanting to work with us and seeing that there was a place for a PACT program.”
According to Fletcher-Gordon, the vision of the PACT program is that it will eventually become a fourth responder, joining police, fire and ambulance.
“The only way, in my view, that we're going to get there is by working together,” she told the police board. “You know, some PACT programs feel very differently. They don't see the benefits of working with police like we do, and I think that's really unfortunate, because if we're going to get as far as we can go, we've all got to work together in a community. We all have services and positions and perspectives to offer, and they're all valuable. So, I just want to thank you on behalf of Purpose.”
Sto Thomas said the program has a very diverse team, which is great because the program has supported clients from 14 to 91 years of age. She said the team members have a range of experiences, including registered clinical counsellors and social workers, and people who have worked extensively in social services and homelessness services (including shelters, safe injection sites, youth transition houses, and drop-in centres).
“The makeup of the PACT program is a mental health worker and a peer support worker. So, you have someone with a bit more clinical background and someone who has a lot of value through lived experience that team up,” she said. “They all get an extensive kind of training that all looks the same, but that pairing is really complimentary when you have a clinical person and someone that's maybe been through some of the stuff that the folks we've been meeting have been through and can build rapport quite quickly because of that.”
Police board member Heather Boersma questioned if PACT teams ever encounter situations where they feel someone needs to be sectioned (hospitalized) under the Mental Health Act.
Sto Thomas said there have been incidents where team members have had to call the police when a person was at imminent risk of harm to themselves or others, such as a suicide risk; one case involved a threat of violence. Otherwise, she said the PACT team works closely with its liaison at the NWPD, a mental health officer, to coordinate that response.
“When there's a situation that presents itself where the person is really, really unwell, and perhaps does need to be sectioned, we try to work with him to coordinate, to make that happen, and try to do it in the most trauma-informed way,” she said. “We do sometimes reach out to police for those matters.”
From the PACT perspective, the gap in services would be for the folks who are needing extensive, long-term mental health services, said Fletcher-Gordon.
“The PACT program goes, stabilizes the situation, can offer a service for a period of time. But it's a crisis intervention service, so it can't go on forever,” she explained. “There are some people in the community who have some serious mental health problems; they're out there, they're isolated. … We somehow need to start thinking about what's available for those folks.”
In addition to calls from individuals who are in crisis, PACT also receives referrals from the NWPD, Transit Police, local businesses and community members, as well as staff in other city departments (including fire, bylaws, the library, and recreation facilities like the Century House and the youth drop-in centre) who encounter someone in crisis and believe they would benefit from its services.
In New Westminster, the PACT program currently operates seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. It’s currently comprised of 16 members.
“We’re actually expanding our team right now. We are hiring more folks to have more capacity to support folks here in New West,” Sto Thomas said. “So currently with our model, we just have one pair of crisis responders per shift. There's a morning shift and afternoon shift. We're expanding to have multiple teams per shift to handle the increased call load.”
On occasions where more than one call comes in for assistance from the team, PACT staff triage those calls based on urgency and let callers know about the timeline for a response.
Victoria, the North Vancouver and New West were the first B.C. communities to pilot the Peer Assisted Care Team, with support of the Canadian Mental Health Association and funding from the province. Programs in Prince George, Kamloops and Comox Valley have since launched or are set to get underway, with others expected to follow.
NWPD responds to mental health
Acting Chief Const. Paul Hyland said the New Westminster Police Department and the Purpose Society had a lot of conversations prior to the program’s launch about what their relationship would look like with the Peer Assisted Care Team.
“It takes kind of a holistic look at some of these challenges. They're very complex and nuanced, and they bleed into other areas, including homelessness and areas of addiction,” he told the police board. “We are very pleased with the relationship we have.”
Hyland thanked the Peer Assisted Care Team for all the work it’s doing in New Westminster.
“We talk oftentimes about the upstream services that are required to resolve some of these challenges. We're trying to move away from this being a police primary response type call,” he said. “Sometimes we have to, obviously, but you're doing some amazing work in the community.”
Hyland said the NWPD is open to supporting the program. Although there may be some staffing challenges in the new year in its mental health unit, he said the NWPD it will make it a priority to assist PACT.
In May 2013, the New Westminster Police Department created a dedicated mental health intervention position, with a mental health officer supporting frontline officers responding to crisis-related calls and following up with citizens in need after police make contact. The NWPD’s mental health unit has received more than 1,000 files in the past year.
“Our mental health unit plays a vital role, collaborating directly with community partners like New West Mental Health, Fraser Health, the Peer Assisted Crisis Team, and the city-initiated Crisis Response Pilot Project,” Hyland said in a statement to the Record after the police board meeting. “In addition, members of this unit work closely with our partners at Royal Columbian Hospital on reductions of admission wait times for patients apprehended under the Mental Health Act.”
Hyland said the NWPD’s mental health unit is typically staffed by two dedicated officers, but both positions are expected to be temporarily vacant beginning in early 2025 due to staff leave.
“Given the essential nature of this work, we're actively exploring interim solutions to ensure these critical services continue,” he said. “Additionally, looking forward we are optimistic that New Westminster will be considered for future funding under the Province’s Safer Communities Action Plan, for an Integrated Crisis Response Team – a partnership of police and mental health professionals – to enhance our response to mental health-related calls for service.”
According to NWPD statistics, the police department received 658 mental health related calls between January and September 2024. That’s up from the 427 calls (in the same time frame) in 2022 and the 621 calls in 2023.
