New supports are in place for those in need of mental health care after RCMP launched a crisis team in Cochrane and the outlying area.
The Regional Police and Crisis Team (RPACT), a partnership between RCMP and Alberta Health Services, launched March 7.
It will consist of a police officer and a mental-health clinician focusing on addressing mental health concerns.
RPACT will assist 11 detachments spanning from Banff to Drumheller but will be based out of the Cochrane RCMP detachment.
Melanié Michaud is the RCMP officer with RPACT. She said the unit’s priority is intervention before a mental-health issue escalates.
“Our main goal is going to be to keep people out of the emergency room,” Michaud said. “If we’re able to go out into the community and serve people who need a little bit of attention … before it escalates to a crisis level, then that’s going to reduce calls to police down the line and reduce the burden on AHS.”
The RPACT unit will be multifaceted, attending to incidents through a referral system from both AHS and the RCMP. They may also serve as secondary support to incidents if they’re in the area when an incident occurs.
“Given the breadth of the area, we may or may not be present when someone is actively in crisis,” Michaud said. “If we happen to be in the right area, we can attend to support general duty police officers. However, the primary response of that nature is going to be less common for us.”
What Michaud said will be common will be the unit following up with individuals referred to the services from AHS and detachment counterparts. Additionally, the unit’s mental-health clinician, Tanya Hansen, will be available for phone consultation.
Hansen, a registered psychiatric nurse and who has experience on RPACT teams in the Edmonton area, said that her role with the unit will be to provide mental health expertise and act as a bridge between the RCMP and AHS.
“There are certain things about mental health that are not necessarily overt to other people — especially police or family members — so it can be hard to understand that a person may be quite ill,” Hansen said. “A big part of mental health is losing insight. People don’t necessarily reach out … so we get to go to their home, where they’re at and hopefully also improve police response to mental health by giving them awareness of some things they maybe wouldn’t think of if they didn’t have support from a mental health position.”
Police calls relating to mental health have increased throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. S-Sgt. Colette Zazulak said calls relating to mental health increased 10 per cent in Alberta from 2019-21.
RCMP superintendent Rick Jané noted the implementation of RPACT will hopefully serve to avoid unnecessary use-of-force incidents in the future.
“Police are often called upon to deal with emergency situations, especially in remote and rural areas, where there is no other government agency on duty,” Jané said. “That will still be the case, even with the RPACT teams [but] they can make a significant difference because what they’ll be doing is mentoring and developing police officers and people at the local hospital about how the partnerships can better function.”
“The more work we can do to work collaboratively in how we approach these types of mental health problems, the more we can get involved in helping police and citizens realize that there are other ways of responding to crises both in advance and when they’re happening,” Jané added.
The RPACT unit will only serve those 18 years of age and older but can also connect youth with appropriate services.
