Highschool Hub Helps Youth Access Clinical Care

[With regards to the "Hub" clinic in the local high school] Child Youth Mental Health Collaboration, which was through Divisions, right? The LATs? So that was a five-year project and when it came to an end there was still some dollars coming to maintain it and what we did is we made a shift to Valley Community Services which has a contract for the low-risk child youth mental health. So they take care of all that but in that five years, we talked a lot about the need for a clinic space in the high school and what that could look like. And so School District 8 initially [said] no, but there was a change of principal at the school and so we shared the idea with him and three months later we opened a clinic that runs two days a week at the high school...And so it’s two half-days, Wednesdays and Thursdays. They work with the counselling department at the high school. Physicians are there on Thursdays and on Wednesdays it’s a public health nurse. And then the second office always has a mental health counsellor in it. We’ve got mental health youth workers that are there and the kids self-identify that they need to be seen. So I actually went up to the Hub last week for the morning because I’m really trying to figure out how I make it part of my job description to be there every week. I’m not getting there yet, but I’m still working on that because – I know. I have been involved with a lot of youth initiatives in this community and I was really excited about this one. But the kids, they come in and they will say, “I need to talk to a public health nurse,” and they self book their own appointment and they are given a receipt that they share to the teacher and they have a 15-minute appointment. So talking to the doctors, they see between 12 and 15 teenagers every single Thursday. And they are dealing with, I’ve got a sore throat, I sprained my ankle at the soccer – on the soccer pitch the other day, or mental health issues, birth control. [Person X] has partnered with – she was the last hospital to get in on the BC Women’s Children’s free IUD program so we’re just starting that and the free birth control so we have $6,000.00 worth of inventory, no cost, geared for the students in the Hub and so we’re not putting IUDs in at the high school. We have a different clinic space where that’ll happen but at least we have an Options for Sexual Health clinic in town, but we can’t give free through Options so now we have this funding which is excellent.