A Response to Dr. Fern Stockdale Winder’s Report on “Working Together For Change: A 10 Year Mental
- cfsregina160
- Dec 16, 2014
- 2 min read
A Response to Dr. Fern Stockdale Winder’s Report on “Working Together For Change: A 10 Year Mental Health and Addiction Action Plan”
The issue is how to make this happen in a progressive incremental process in such a large province. There are two key issues that will impede any such progress.
1) Lack of decent funding in the systems (education, health, social services, justice, labor and community /culture/ recreation), to move beyond isolated projects. Saskatchewan has one of the smallest allotments per person in a provincial budget for mental health service across Canada. To achieve the goal of an integrated strategic provincial plan will require tripling the budget at minimum. Money drives capacity to respond and improvements in impacts across the spectrum of need (education, motivation and prevention; early intervention and diversion; acute response services; and long term supports). Each ministry needs designated dollars in their respective budgets to champion the components identified by Dr. Stockdale Winder. At present, there just isn’t enough dollars allocated in any ministry to build a comprehensive plan that will make a significant change in impact.
2) A long history of compartmentalization and service silos. This is the main impediment to sharing communication, building collaboration, sharing resources and building a truly family centred holistic approach. Even successful demonstration projects have hit the wall and either been reduced so they are no longer effective due to changing priorities or have never emerged from the project phase.
These two impediments are mutually reinforcing. The less dollars, the greater need to protect and limit services – which reinforces compartmentalization. The latter reinforces protecting budgets based on traditional ways of service delivery so as to sustain existing budgets.
Dr. Stockdale Winder’s report gives a clear indication of what to do but not how to do it and what a reasonable timeframe would be for implementation. One can only hope there are people in the present government who have read the report and are discussing the merits of taking the bold steps necessary to make it happen.
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