ABC Vancouver’s 100 nurse promise unmet, but health authority reports program success

Three years later, Mayor Ken Sim’s pledge to hire 100 mental health nurses hasn’t been met although the new supports appear to be making a difference.

It was a 2022 campaign promise from Ken Sim that caught everybody’s attention – a pledge to hire 100 mental health care nurses along with 100 police officers if he became mayor.

Three years later, the promise has evolved into something different.

After bringing Vancouver Coastal Health into the decision-making process, a choice was made to hire mental health workers – some of whom are not actually nurses.

On Tuesday, VCH provided an update on how the program is going through a presentation to city council, saying 41 of 50 full-time equivalent positions are currently filled.

It reported the Vancouver Inner City Urgent Mental Health and Substance Use Service Program has helped 8,000 people so far this year. It said its mobile de-escalation team resulted in a 38 per cent drop in emergency room visits post-intervention.

VCH also reported a 46 per cent drop in police interactions for clients a month after a Car 87/88 intervention, with a drop of 20 per cent six months after an intervention. Car 87 is a Vancouver Police and VCH partnership which involves a plain clothes police officer responding to mental health calls alongside a psychiatric nurse.

“So they have hired 41 of 50 mental health workers and nurses, and what we’re heard today from Coastal Health is that they’ve determined that that 50 staffing complement is actually the right number of staff as opposed to the 100 we promised during the campaign,” ABC city councillor Peter Meiszner told CTV News outside city hall when asked about some of the criticism of the 100 nurse promise not being met.

OneCity Vancouver councillor Lucy Maloney believes the program has provided meaningful benefits, but pushed back on the suggestion that members of the public shouldn’t be upset the promise of 100 new mental health nurses wasn’t literally fulfilled.

“Going into an election year, ABC needs to not continue to make promises in the lead up to an election that are impossible for them to carry out, or oversimplify and gloss over the complexity of the problem and mislead the public,” Maloney told CTV News on Tuesday.

There’s also a larger question of why Vancouver city council felt the need to invest millions of dollars into funding the hiring of nurses – a health care issue which falls under the jurisdiction of the provincial government.

“The City of Vancouver shouldn’t have to be doing that,” B.C. Conservative mental health and addictions critic Claire Rattée told CTV News at the legislature on Tuesday. “It’s $8 million put into this, and they’re seeing results. So if the provincial government wanted to figure out how to fix this problem, they could look at what the City of Vancouver is doing and pick up the tab like they should be.”

Meiszner expressed similar frustration with the NDP government, saying the provincial government was not providing the appropriate level of support for the mental health challenges being felt at the local level.

With the majority ABC council pursuing a zero or negligible property tax increase, Maloney also expressed concerns about where the city will make cuts – given funding this mental health program is not a core program but has been identified as a continued priority by council.