November 14, 2024

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Expanded Queensway Carleton mental health centre serves a growing need

Expanded Queensway Carleton mental health centre serves a growing need

“It’s a step forward in the way we treat mental illness. Not just clinical treatment, but the way we, as a society, view mental illness.

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The opening of an expanded, state-of-the art mental health centre at Queensway Carleton Hospital comes at a time when the need has never been greater.

Last year, the west-end Ottawa hospital treated 14,600 patients requiring mental health services — an increase of 26 per cent in just four years. Increasingly, those patients are sicker and require more complex care than was typical in the past.

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The new centre, named for Ottawa philanthropists and donors Barbara Crook and Dan Greenberg, was officially opened on Thursday.

Three years ago, Ava-Grace Sliwa was one of those patients arriving at the hospital in desperate need. The Ottawa-based university student was struggling with worsening mental illness that spiraled down during the COVID-19 pandemic. By the time she got to the Queensway Carleton emergency department, she believed she would be better off not to be alive. Treatment, first as an inpatient and later an out-patient at the hospital, “allowed me to have my life back better than ever before.”

The biomedical student is now a member of the hospital’s patient and family advisory council. Looking around the newly renovated, light-filled outpatient space on Thursday, Sliwa said, “When I look around, I am reminded of the many days I have walked this floor in my hospital gown. But today I am in my own clothes with a hospital badge.”

She called the new centre, “an immense indicator of progress toward addressing the stigma of mental illness.”

For patients, families, those who care for patients and those whose donations and advocacy helped build the centre, it is about more than bricks and mortar.

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“It’s a step forward in the way we treat mental illness,” Crook said. “Not just clinical treatment, but the way we, as a society, view mental illness. The centre is a place of hope and wellness.”

Crook spoke about her own experiences with depression and the stigma her father faced when he received treatment for mental illness when she was a child. A decade ago, she visited a family member being treated for mental illness at Queensway Carleton and was struck by the surroundings.

“The treatment was excellent, but the facility left a lot to be desired.”

Ava-Grace Sliwa Barbara Crook Michele Valcourt Queensway Carleton mental health centre
Donor Barbara Crook, left, receives a hug from Michele Valcourt, mother to Ava-Grace Sliwa, rear, during Thursday’s official opening ceremony. Photo by JULIE OLIVER /POSTMEDIA

Planning for the new centre, including an expanded in-patient floor with single rooms and a light-filled out-patient clinic with an exercise room, meeting and treatment rooms, a kitchen and garden, began about a decade ago at a time when campaigns to remove stigma around mental illness were gaining traction locally and across Canada. Among donors to the fundraising campaign that helped build the new centre were Luke and Stephanie Richardson, whose daughter, Daron, died by suicide in 2010. Her death led to the creation of the Do It For Daron campaign to help inspire conversations about youth mental health.

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Queensway Carleton Chief of Staff Kathi Kovacs, a psychiatrist at the hospital, said the new centre, with individual patient rooms, private bathrooms and upgraded and more space for treatment, would make a difference to the wellbeing of patients being treated there.

“Most of us really care about our environment,” Kovacs said. “We don’t want to be in a dark room, a cold room, with people we don’t know, sharing bathrooms.”

In the past, she said, some people left the unit “because of our environment.” She said there was a marked difference in patients’ wellbeing since the first phase of the new centre, the in-patient unit. opened about a year ago. “People are sleeping at night. It is not as noisy or disruptive. It is an incredible change.”

The Ontario government provided $9 million, and a fundraising campaign through the Queensway Carleton Foundation raised $6 million.

“We have given people in Ottawa with mental illness the gift of a safe and healing space where their should can be nurtured with dignity and with hope,” Crook said.

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