An open letter to the Here 24/7 community

Since we launched our new system on April 1, we’ve connected thousands of residents across the region with vital addictions, mental health and crisis supports.

Despite these early successes, we have not been able to help many who have reached out to us for support.

Some callers to our phone number have faced long waits, leading around 25% to hang up before speaking with one of our Service Coordinators.

We’ll explain what’s behind this in a moment.

First, we apologize for the challenges that the launch of Here 24/7 has encountered. We are sorry to anyone kept waiting as they reached out to us for help.

We appreciate this frustration and feel it too, as we have not been able to respond to our callers how we wanted. We hope that you will be patient with us as we work out the bugs.

Here’s why we’ve had trouble. Based on the best data available to us as we designed this service, we expected to get around 80 calls and walk-ins per day. Instead, we’ve consistently had around 400 people contacting us each weekday.

This clearly shows the need in our community for our kind of service: a single gateway into the entire addictions, mental health and crisis sector across our region, with help and support to navigate this system.

We knew that a simpler system would lead more people to call us for help.

We had no way of predicting this heavy demand. Simply put, we’re overwhelmed by the volumes.

Our Service Coordinators are working very hard to stay on top of the calls we receive.

They’ve seen firsthand the difference it makes for peoples’ lives when Here 24/7 runs smoothly.

We have also had excellent feedback from the folks that we have been able to connect with and meet their needs.

We meet each day to make big and small improvements to our process. We are also recruiting additional staff to help out with the high demand.

These and other changes will go a long way to ensuring all who need help will have fast access to Here 24/7’s services and supports through our Service Coordinators.

Please stick with us. Your feedback is important and will help us make any changes required. Please also keep reaching out and encouraging those you know who may be in need to call.

Helen Fishburn, MSW

Director,

Here 24/7 Service

CMHA WWD