Driven by Compassion

Katie Ward started working at the Turning Point overdose prevention site in Red Deer, Alta., when it opened nearly four years ago, but she didn’t realize she would be saving lives — literally — every day. “At the beginning I found the overdoses very traumatic,” she says. “You’re essentially seeing people almost die right in front of you. You watch them turn blue. Now it’s like second nature; I just respond.”

Housed in a trailer in downtown Red Deer, the site receives an average of 110 visitors a day. Some are there for just a few minutes while others stay for hours. They bring their own drugs — fentanyl, methamphetamine, sometimes cocaine — and are given clean supplies and a small cubicle.

A team of nurses, paramedics and harm reduction staff watches over them as they inject and the drugs enter their system. If they overdose, they are given oxygen or naloxone to stop it. In June 2022, the team reversed 110 overdoses.

A lot of the clients her team serves are unhoused, “so they have nowhere else to go,” Ward says. “We are non-judgmental and we provide a safe place so they don’t have to hide and risk overdosing alone.”

The clients come from Red Deer and smaller communities in central Alberta. Ward says clients are often victims of sexual abuse or intergenerational trauma. Some were prescribed narcotics for work injuries, then became addicted.

“Typically they are using drugs as a way of coping with their struggles,” Ward says. She says that humanity is at the core of staff-client interactions in the clinic and that she can’t judge clients by how they cope with their struggles. 

Turning Point connects clients with detox, mental health treatment and housing services when it can. In June 2022, staff made 321 such referrals. It’s the success stories that keep Ward going. Often, she says, the first step to change is the compassionate relationship the staff build with their clients.

“I just like being there for them. They’re being judged all day, every day, everywhere they go. We provide a quiet place where they can just be, and do their thing safely,” says Ward, who was raised in the Christian faith. 

“I don’t really consider myself a Christian anymore,” she says. “But I do believe that if Jesus were on this earth, he would be there in the trenches with me, loving the unlovable, saving the overdosing, treating humans like humans.” 

Read the full story "Big Care in Small Centres" in our Winter 2022 Alumni Magazine: https://issuu.com/uofanursing/docs/nursing_winter2022_v10.