Albertans debate government's plan to close mental-health hospital beds

By Dean Bennett (CP) 

EDMONTON — The man in the blue baseball hat, a Tim Hortons coffee in hand, sits on the bench in the unseasonably stifling early morning heat and shouts at passing cars on downtown Jasper Avenue. He can be heard a block away.

Across the intersection, another man scours the bus-bench trash can for returnables. Spittle hangs in a gossamer thread off his beard.

The scene is commonplace in major cities, mentally ill with nowhere to go.

But it's one that has become a fulcrum of angry debate in Alberta as the province forges ahead with plans to close more than half the 410 beds at Alberta Hospital, the region's mental health bedrock and backstop for 86 years.

It underlines pessimism with a government trying to cut, mould and remake a health-care system on the fly in the face of crashing oil and gas prices and multibillion-dollar deficits.

The plan, announced last month, will see patients moved out and the beds closed behind them over the next one to three years as equivalent beds become available in other hospitals or in community sites.

No patient, it is stressed, will leave until there is a commensurate spot to go.

Tom Shand, executive director of the Alberta division of the Canadian Mental Health Association, agrees with the principle but not the timeline.

"It's almost like putting up a building at the same time you're bringing in tenants," says Shand. "The broader planning has not been done. It's being rushed."

The decision has met fierce resistance from lawyers, care advocates, families of patients, psychiatrists in the hospital, police and the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, which represents more than half the staff at the hospital.

The Edmonton Police Commission, the force's civilian oversight body, said last week that a third of the 200,000 emergency calls a year are related to problems that lead back to mental illness.

Cutting beds, it says, will mean more patients becoming abandoned, homeless and sucked into the orbit of crime.

The Criminal Trial Lawyers Association says it's not convinced the province will pony up the cash and supports needed to make the community program work.

Too many of the mentally ill are already in the justice system, the association says, charged with petty crimes and then caught in the pitiable spin cycle of street-arrest-detention, street-arrest-detention.

Last year, a provincial study found that most of Edmonton's 3,500 homeless have addiction or mental illness problems.

The AUPE, which represents therapists, aides, dietary specialists and support staff at the hospital, has taken the battle to the airwaves. It is spending $100,000 on three prime-time TV commercials urging Albertans to tell Premier Ed Stelmach's government that losing the hospital would cause irreparable harm. More Here