RainCity Housing is looking to augment their harm reduction services on the Sunshine Coast.
What they want to do, Isaac Malmgren, associate director of RainCity, says is provide more peer witnessing workers in the homeless shelters where people are using illicit drugs.
He says they are not looking to open an overdose prevention site.
“Really, we see an overdose prevention site as being a stand-alone dedicated service where we would call this in-house safer consumption, sometimes they are referred to as housing overdose prevention services or we would also refer to it, internally, as a peer witnessing service. So, it’s really just an augmentation of existing services at a housing or shelter site as opposed to creating a new service.”
Peer witnesses, Malmgren says, are people with lived experience who would be on hand to ensure no one overdoses from using illicit drugs.
