DART program fills gap, says women’s shelter executive director

“That’s what we’ve always seen is that we knew that was a gap that there had to be lots of people coming through emerg but we weren’t really, there was no sort of way to connect that to make that happen,” she said. “And I know that we’ve heard a lot from health-care professionals that they’re like ‘we don’t want to open up the door to ask those questions because that’s not our expertise’ and fair enough. And so that’s really all it is just trying to get to people when they present there.”

She says the goal is early intervention and the program creates more opportunities to start conversations. She compares it to the success the shelter had after partnering with the Medicine Hat Police Service on the Safe Families Intervention Team years ago.

“People tend to think it’s about physical violence and of course it is and that’s often a lot of what we see but sometimes it’s not,” Carvalho explains. “It’s emotional, it’s financial, its sort of insidious ways of things happening and course of control is in that. And so we just want to be able to have conversations about ‘how are you doing?’ and is there something else going on that you want to talk about?’”

Carvalho says the women’s shelter has already received calls since the program launched Monday.

by Chris Brown

DART program fills gap, says women’s shelter executive director

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