Every year, the Yorkton RCMP receives approximately 300 calls related to mental health. A new program, a partnership between the Government of Saskatchewan, the RCMP and the Saskatchewan Health Authority, aims to better equip the police to deal with those calls and lead to more positive outcomes. Police and Crisis Team (PACT) has just launched in Yorkton, pairing health professionals and police officers in a mobile team.
Staff Sgt. Jeff Simpson said the goal of PACT is to see more positive outcomes for mental health calls, partially by giving more tools to the police to use during a call.
“Without this partnership, the tools that the police, or our frontline members have, typically result in an emergency visit, potentially incarceration. This allows us to get help to people who need it the most as soon as possible and potentially divert them from those outcomes,” said Simpson.
The other goal is to save the police time during calls, as the mental health professional would know if someone needs emergency care or if they just need to be connected to different services, explained Simpson. With the police on their own, every call would mean a trip to emergency, potentially taking that officer off the street for hours.
Beyond calls centred around mental health as the primary reason for calling, Simpson said that many of the other calls that the RCMP gets on any given day have mental health and addictions as a factor in the crime.
“Mental health is an important piece in our policing and an important piece in our community.”
Jacquie Holzmann, Director of Primary Health Care with the Saskatchewan Health Authority said that from their perspective, it’s a way to help people where they’re having their crisis, rather than having them go through emergency. The end goal is to have better outcomes.
“We’ll have one team member who is assigned, and I think that will really help with consistency. She’ll know the clients, she’ll have that great partnership with our community. I think it’ll be great for our clients and for our RCMP partners,” added Holzmann.
The program has been operating in Regina and Saskatoon for a couple of years, and also recently expanded to Prince Albert. Greg Ottenbreit, Minister for Rural and Remote Health, said that in those communities, it has been working quite well, and has been connecting people with the services they need instead of incarcerating them or sending them to emergency.
With the successful implementation of the program so far, Ottenbreit said that the plan is to keep expanding PACT.
“We’ve hit the major cities, and now as the opportunities arise we will see where we can expand them even further.”
Locally, the PACT program is currently within the bounds of the Yorkton Municipal RCMP, though there is potential for it to expand into rural and remote communities in the future as the program gets established, said Simpson.
