When rural Yukoners are discharged from a hospital, corrections centre or treatment facility, there is no co-ordinated system to help them return home.

That gap in service is contributing to homelessness, according to a recent Safe at Home report.

“It is having a massive impact; it’s a systemic thing,” Kate Mechan, the Safe at Home implementation manager, told the Star earlier this month.

“It’s not any one system’s program, or lack of effort, or lack of trying; it’s just that if the buck ends when a person exits a system … people are really stuck in this revolving door, particularly in the justice system.”

A count conducted in Whitehorse on April 17, 2018 found that 195 people experienced homelessness that night.

Of those 195, almost 50 people indicated that they were from a rural Yukon community.

Eighty-two per cent of individuals experiencing homelessness that night identified as Indigenous.

Addressing the lack of co-ordinated planning for individuals leaving public systems was highlighted as a priority for Safe at Home’s 2017 Action Plan to End and Prevent Homelessness.

A report to address that priority, Coordinated Discharge Planning for Rural Yukon Citizens, was completed last month.

It calls for a co-ordinated access system to navigate issues around housing and discharge from Whitehorse-based public systems.

“It’s really a way to design, streamline and bring consistency to how people access housing and support,” Mechan said.

The report recommends increasing telehealth technology; expanding the housing by-name list to offer community migration; creating temporary aftercare accommodations in Whitehorse; and providing consistent transportation to communities.

The report also calls for a working group between the Yukon government, Safe at Home and First Nations governments to be formed in the next six months.

According to Mechan, the report addresses and itemizes issues that have been anecdotally understood by service providers for a long time.

“This report pulls that together in a more succinct and tangible way,” Mechan said.

“There is discharge planning happening all the time, but it’s actually not as co-ordinated as it could be.” 

The report found the challenges to successful discharge planning can be divided into six key areas:

1. Lack of transportation between Whitehorse and rural communities;

2. Disco-ordination between service providers;

3. Lack of services in rural Yukon;

4. Lack of familial or community support networks in an individual’s home community;

5. Lack of clear definition for what constitutes a rural client; and

6. Knowledge of available resources is limited.

According to Mechan, providing accessible transportation is the first priority.

“We’ve known transportation has been an issue for years, but it’s particularly complex for vulnerable people,” Mechan said.

The first step will be opening a dialogue with the many organizations that have independently decried the lack of transportation over the years.

“If we’ve been talking about this for 10 years or more, what’s stopping the next phase, what’s stopping implementation?” Mechan asked. 

She suggested that rural community members should be brought into that discussion.

“Maybe the solutions are in the communities, and they already know, and we just need to bring some of that representation to the table in a different way.

Disco-ordination between service providers, as well as program constraints, also cause a number of challenges for Yukoners, the report says.

Clients discharged after hours and on weekends, for example, leave rural Yukoners without many options outside the emergency shelter.

Unpredictable release dates also make it difficult to plan for discharge in advance.

Transitioning clients back to their home community is not required of most Whitehorse-based systems. As well, there is a lack of centralized housing support for those wishing to return home.

There is also the problem of lack of services available in those communities.

“Community-situated barriers” require clients to either stay in Whitehorse or travel frequently between Whitehorse and their home communities.

According to Mechan, an established co-ordinated access system should take into account that some rural Yukoners may want to stay in Whitehorse.

“People come to Whitehorse, and there’s this notion they get stuck in Whitehorse and they should go home, but what we heard is that’s not necessarily helpful when people need support,” Mechan said.

“We need to acknowledge that Whitehorse is our service hub.”

Some clients may be disconnected from their home communities and lack a support network there.

“People have freedom of movement to live where they want to,” Mechan said.

“I don’t want to speak for Indigenous people, but people came here and developed peer networks, and they really want to maintain a strong connection with their First Nation but that doesn’t necessarily mean they want to live in the community they were born in.”

Providing support without pigeon-holing clients as rural- or Whitehorse-based will help establish discharge plans that work best for each person.

“It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach and we’re not labelling people,” Mechan said.