It’s been all hands on deck at the Red Deer Recovery Community, since the first resident was accepted on May 15.
“We’re a 75-bed facility and we’re most of the way to being at capacity,” said Ben Borger, clinic manager at the EHN Canada-operated facility.
“We’re helping as many people as we can and we’re basically in full operations right now.”
The facility focuses on providing holistic, medically supervised addiction treatment while specializing in concurrent mental health programming.
Construction on the $20-million Red Deer Recovery Community began in November 2021 and wrapped up earlier this year. The facility is fully funded by the Government of Alberta, making its beds available to Albertans at no cost.
“We’re a long-term treatment facility, so it’s too early to look at full outcome measures,” Borger explained.
“We’ve been providing excellent care and I can report that many in our first cohort are still here. They’re still changing their lives.”
A typical day for residents of the Red Deer Recovery Community depends on the individual, Borger noted.
“We have many different phases of our program. But the first two phases are more typical treatment, where they would wake up, have a therapeutic meeting,” he said.
“From there, they might do a smudge to cleanse their spirit and then they would have group therapy, a lecture, (cognitive behavioural therapy), (dialectical behaviour therapy) or some kind of education group. Then in the evening, there’s a community meeting.”
When someone is further along in their treatment they could enter a third phase, where they participate in programming in the mornings and in the afternoons they can leave the facility to do something like volunteer or go to school.
“Doing that they can build other aspects of their recovery capital. They return to the centre for curfew, but it’s like a hybrid between doing treatment and starting to build other skills outside of the community,” he said
Facilities like the Red Deer Recovery Community are “crucially important,” Borger added.
“It’s all a part of the continuum of care,” he said.
“It’s something the community really needed and based on the interest we’ve received, we can see the demand is quite high for a program like this. We’re able to change a lot of lives and it’s amazing the Alberta government has provided this sort of centre, which is the first of its kind in Canada.”
More information on the Red Deer Recovery Community can be found at www.edgewoodhealthnetwork.com.
sean.mcintosh@reddeeradvocate.com
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